Perhaps 10 years ago the mere thought of serious gaming on a phone (except for maybe a few 2d titles lol😀) would seem pretty laughable but with games like pubg, fortnite, hearthstone, asphalt 9, and even the rumored mobile port of ark survival evolved it would seem that people should be a bit more excited by the mere thought of playing PC quality titles on a mobile phone, but you're not wrong to not get excited cause the idea of playing games like far cry five on a phone is still not smooth sailing and here are my ideas towards the aspect of gaming on phones and the limiting factors.
1.) Phones don't support most PC games graphical elements......yet
When was the last time you actually played a mobile game that supported things like dynamic grasses, dynamic weather, ambient lighting, amazing post processing effects, realistic models? Well never! Even pubg on mobile have toned down the realistic graphics and some features on the PC port just to make it playable on mobile. Game engines like unity and unreal engine don't actually support most of the post processing effects on mobile leaving developers no choice but to make do with what's available often times meaning games with less than stellar graphics compared to PC games. And this is a fault of who exactly? The game engine? The developer? The os? We will never truly seem to find out.
2.) How much are you willing to pay upfront for a smart phone game?
PC games cost upwards of $60 reaching the high terrains of $100, using pubg as another example it was not a free game when available for PC but guess how much it costs when released on mobile? Well nothing! Most smart phone game developers make their games free hoping to get a large audience of players and hopefully they buy in app purchases which seems to be working but not for every developers some even incorporate ads just to meet development costs which sucks. Mobile games may never have the same amount of expenditure as PC games cause of these factors no developer will spend millions develop a game only to be sold for free! And the highest I have seen a smart phone game cost is around $9 which still sold way less than free counterparts.
3.) Smartphones are an entirely different market than PCs.
Every body knows that to play a decent AAA title on PC you need decent hardware. But the average consumer of smartphones just want to go to the store and download a game and expect it to play on their phone like they saw on their friend's, now when the game refuses to run at all or lags seriously they blame the phone manufacturer or the operating system not knowing that their sub $150 phone runs a mt6580 processor and 2GB of ram. Now android/iOS ate designed in such a way that both powerful and sub par phones can be able to run the same software and play the same games ( heck I use a cheapo $150 android phone but play pubg all the time) so developers target the least hardware possible and when the least hardware is targeted the developer has to let go of some jaw dropping graphical elements.
Not to say that smartphone gaming has no future but.......it's a tough one at this point.