An anonymous modder has brought one of the best mobile games, Infinity Blade, to PC 5 years after it left the App Store

pcgamer.com:

Infinity Blade is not something I've had cause to think about for a damn long time. The swipey ARPG launched on iOS way back in 2010, and because I've never owned an Apple product I was left out of all the fun. And there was plenty of fun to be had, with simple-but-responsive brawls and graphics that blew other mobile games of the era out of the water. This, along with a slew of positive reviews, bumped it up the iOS charts, where it became the fastest growing app ever in the App Store at the time. 

Unfortunately, due to the difficulties of keeping it updated for modern hardware, Infinity Blade was removed from the App Store by Epic Games in 2018, so the only way you could play was if you'd kept your old phone. But now you can not only play it again, you can do so on your PC after a fan port was revealed on the Infinity Blade subreddit.

An anonymous modder has done all the hard work of getting it up and running, as well as tweaking textures, adding dynamic shadows and introducing support for hotkeys and keybinds. A recent update also added Proton compatibility, so it's now playable on Steam Deck as well, which feels like an even more appropriate platform for something that's still, ultimately, a mobile game. 

The modder and the team assisting them emphasise that they've «done this for the sake of lost media preservation», which feels like an even greater necessity in the realm of mobile games. For instance, new phone models come out at a much more rapid rate than consoles, which have pretty long life cycles, and even then old games often get ports or are backwards-compatible. On PC, meanwhile, we've got companies like GOG and Nightdive Studios working to bring back games that launched long before the current digital ecosystem existed. Mobile gaming, as a result, feels substantially more fleeting. 

While not as strict and litigious as, say, Nintendo, Epic could still throw a spanner in the works in the shape of a cease and desist. Unofficial fan projects like this