Published on 31 July 2025 by Andrew Owen (8 minutes)
This is the story of how an unloved mobile video game that was abandoned after four years was revived by Netflix and became a better gaming experience than the more successful title it was based on. It begins in 2004 with the release of the first title in Gameloft’s Asphalt arcade racing series for the Nokia N-Gage. The first dedicated gaming cell phone, the N-Gage was a flop. But the series is still going after more than 20 titles.
Nokia guessed correctly that the future of portable gaming would be phones, rather than dedicated gaming systems like the GameBoy Advance. But it failed to deliver a compelling platform. It would take Apple to make the smartphone a mainstream device, just as it had previously done with the portable media player (that’s why it’s called podcasting). I was a latecomer to smartphones. My first in 2011, four years after the iPhone launched, was the Nokia 700. Its operating system, Symbian Belle, was derived from EPOC, which I had previously used on the Psion 5 palmtop (my only computer during my year in Australia). I first played Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja on the 700. Opera Mobile was my browser of choice. And with Feature Pack 2 came full Microsoft Office support. But app support was drying up.
After Microsoft bought Nokia, I made the switch to a Lumia 530 running Windows Phone 8.1 (which finally had feature parity with Symbian). This is where I discovered Asphalt 8 Airborne. It was the most popular arcade racer on mobile at the time, and a decade later it still has millions of players. The main difference from previous entries in the series, as indicated by the title, was the addition of far more ramps. As a Mac user since 1993, I missed out on many of the big titles that were never ported, but I began to build-up a collection of old PC games on GoG when Macs went to the x86 architecture. But even when I worked full-time in the games industry, I was more of a casual gamer. Between work, parenting, running a household, personal projects and side hustles, there isn’t time to play triple-A titles.
Windows Phone 8.1 was a great mobile OS, but app support was drying up, and it was clear that the future would be an Android/iOS duopoly. So in 2016, I got an iPhone SE to take advantage of 4G (and I’d still be using it if my eyesight hadn’t forced me to get the slightly larger iPhone 13 mini in 2021). By this time I’d been playing Asphalt 8 for a couple of years, built up a fairly impressive collection of cars and completed most of the challenges. But there was no way to use the same account on the iPhone as on Windows Phone. Fortunately, I was running Windows 10 on the PC that I’d initially built as a Hackintosh (the only PC I’ve ever owned), and it was possible to play on that. But now I had to deal with oncoming traffic (thoughtfully omitted on small-screen mobile devices).
Later that year, Gameloft released Asphalt Xtreme, an off-road spin-off of Asphalt 8 using the same game engine and physics, with many tracks being reworks of the Asphalt 8 versions. One of the main issues I have with Asphalt 8 is that the collision detection is terrible. Bounding boxes frequently overlap, causing you to crash when you really shouldn’t. In a pay-to-play fremium game this can not only be frustrating but also expensive. So I decided fairly early on that I wasn’t going to pay to play. With its off-road setting, Asphalt Xtreme is more forgiving on the collision detection, which mostly resolves the issue. However, Asphalt Xtreme never ran well on Windows 10 for me, to the point that it frequently failed to launch.
Eventually Gameloft got its act together, and when I got my iPad Pro in 2018, I was able to migrate my account. One of the advantages of playing Asphalt 8 on the iPad is that you get access to Exclusive Metal Events. These are races where you have up to 24 opponents, instead of the usual eight or so. The iPad is now my main gaming device. I appreciate the 120Hz display (and the ability to drive it at 120FPS) far more than I would a 4K display. I have a mechanical keyboard for it, but I prefer to use a DualShock®4 controller for gaming (even over the DualSense®). I retired the PC in 2020 when I got an M1 Mac mini, but the iPad had already become my main device outside work (Windows 10 was a miserable experience). Since the iPad got a native RuneScape app, the only game I didn’t play on it was the classic Mac version of Master of Orion, but thanks to Infinite Mac, I can now do all my gaming on the iPad.
Over the lifetime of Asphalt 8 it has had a bewlidering number of iterations of its microtransactions system and several user interface overhauls. In fact, I only recently realized that I’d been missing out on daily log-in bonuses (which you get by tapping your profile and then tapping VIP Membership). Fairly early on, it added motorbikes, which, besides lower vehicle costs, is the main thing that sets it apart from its sequel, Ashpalt 9. It also added driver skins, which do add a bit of fun to the motorbikes and open-wheel racers. But I have a blanket rule that I don’t pay for pixels. I’ve still managed to collect a reasonable number through event rewards. Upgrading cars without spending cash takes an age. Some cars can only be bought with blue tokens, which for a time were virtually impossible to get without paying. Most upgrades require purple tokens, which are rationed out. After you have bought all the cars that can be obtaied with credits, the credits themselves stop being very useful, although lately another store has been added where you can trade a limited amount of them for blue and purple tokens.
In summary, the microtransactions are the main annoyance of the game. This is true for all fremium games (in an unusual step, Jagex is currently running a series of experiments to overhaul the microtransaction system in RuneScape). So the thing I appreciated the most about the Netflix relaunch of Asphalt Xtreme was that all the microtransactions were effectively removed. No more timeouts while you wait for vehicles to refuel. No more pay to play. There’s still in game currency, obtained during play and used to upgrade vehicles. But it’s a level playing field. But there is a downside to a reduced income: less content. At this point I’ve obtained all the vehicles, and except for the special event vehicles, they are all maxed out. I’ve effectively completed the game. But it’s still fun to do the daily multiplayer challenges.
With Asphalt 8 it’s a different story. They constantly add new cars and change the classes of older cars. The upshot is that you can only upgrade one car at a time without spending serious amounts of real-world money. At this point, I trade everything in for purple credits so I can finally finish upgrading the best car in the game to give me a better chance in multi-car races (where you need as many top class cars as possible). I’ve lost track of how much content has been added and removed over the years. I’m fairly sure there was a time when you could get HotWheels cars in game. But when the license expired, all the cars were removed. They also added a sort of Mario-Kart mode with on-track powerups that went away for a bit and is back again. In multiplayer races, you used to be able to vote for the track, type of race and number of laps. This is now gone from Asphalt 8, but retained in Asphalt Xtreme. But the biggest change of all is that there’s now a version of Asphalt 8 exclusive to the Apple Arcade that, like Asphalt Xtreme, removes the pay-to-play aspect (and advertising) entirely.
I also play Real Racing 3, a fremium sim racer. It also has microtransactions. You could also spend a vast amount of money on it, unlocking various features. After I started playing with the DulaShock®4, I got good enough to switch off all the assists. But progress without paying is frustratingly slow. My takeaway from all this is that I think subscriptions (both to individual games like RuneScape and gaming services like Apple Arcade, Netflix, PlayStation+ and so on) will eventually completely replace the old fremium model. And while microtransactions won’t go away entirely, they will be more likely to relate to customizations than giving the player an in-game advantage. With the IT industry in general and the games industry in particular currently in a state of flux, something has to give because the old business models are unsustainable.
