Not so sure about this. Most mobile games are developed with Unity. And what appear to be the cutting edge titles are usually using the Unreal engine. There's not much "to the metal" coding going on.
Besides, most mobile games are being played by the casual crowd. Games don't need graphics that push hardware limits to sell.
> Most mobile games are developed with Unity. And what appear to be the cutting edge titles are usually using the Unreal engine.
Any source by mobile OS that you can point to?
I am quite sure there are other contenders like home grown engines, LibGDX, Marmalade, Cocos (all variants), SDL, MonoGame, DirectXTK, Project Anarchy , Apple own Scenekit and SpriteKit,...
> Besides, most mobile games are being played by the casual crowd. Games don't need graphics that push hardware limits to sell.
Why do you think then all major OS vendors are teaching the devs how to reduce their packages sizes? I can happily post the links of such presentations, just need to hunt them down again.
Game logic + Assets + Engine
Something got to give if one is required to push the size down.
> I am quite sure there are other contenders like home grown engines, LibGDX, Marmalade, Cocos (all variants), SDL, MonoGame, DirectXTK, Project Anarchy , Apple own Scenekit and SpriteKit,...
It doesn't matter how many frameworks are out there. If you hang around the game dev scene long enough, you'll see that most small devs are using Unity, and if not that, Cocos2DX. Just head over to Gamasutra, /r/gamedev, or browse Steam & itch.io and see the # of cross platform mobile ports. Talk to devs, they are using Unity.
> Why do you think then all major OS vendors are teaching the devs how to reduce their packages sizes?
Reducing package size isn't really comparable to writing portions of your game in assembler. I don't consider that low level coding or pushing hardware limits.
> It doesn't matter how many frameworks are out there. ....
Former IGDA member, Gamasutra subscriber and GDCE attendee here, hence why I asked for numbers.
> Reducing package size isn't really comparable to writing portions of your game in assembler. I don't consider that low level coding or pushing hardware limits.
It is not, but the goal of fitting as much code as possible in small packages is.
> Former IGDA member, Gamasutra subscriber and GDCE attendee here, hence why I asked for numbers.
Maybe "former" is why. There are no numbers published to confirm or deny. It's apparent if you keep up with the community and ask developers what they use.
> It is not, but the goal of fitting as much code as possible in small packages is.
You're really talking about reducing sizes of assets & included libs. That has more to do with optimizing DL time than hardware performance, and nothing to do with low level coding where you're writing machine instructions without touching a higher level of abstraction. Not the same at all.
Besides, most mobile games are being played by the casual crowd. Games don't need graphics that push hardware limits to sell.