> Nintendo's been doing it for decades with their portable devices (Zelda, Mario, Pokemon, Metroid), and it's clearly a successful approach IMO, part of this i

> Nintendo's been doing it for decades with their portable devices (Zelda, Mario, Pokemon, Metroid), and it's clearly a successful approach IMO, part of this is due to low-level technical issues. The DS does a really, really, really good job at letting players choose when and where they play. Games start up instantly, pausing and resuming is seamless. I don't know how much work developers need to do to support suspend/resume, but I've never seen it not work. In my experience on Android, very few games deal well with getting killed in the background. Yes, this is different than what happens in the DS, but the user experience should be the same. From what I can tell, there is more burden on an Android developer to deliver a seamless resume experience than there is on the DS. Because of that, you can't trust that your game state will be preserved if you do something as simple as lock your phone while your game is running. If you resume, will your game be where you left off? Who knows. Add on functionality that requires online access, and you end up with a platform where people prefer games that load quicker and where you can finish a session in the time it takes to stand in line, if only for the simple reason that anything more complicated usually ends in frustration.