Mobile game

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
(Redirected from
Mobile games
)
A game being played on a smartphone
Video games
Platforms
Genres
Lists
Development

A mobile game is a

network availability.[1]
The earliest known game on a mobile phone was a Tetris variant on the Hagenuk MT-2000 device from 1994.[2][3][4]

In 1997,

platform holder, the App Store significantly changed the consumer behaviour and quickly broadened the market for mobile games, as almost every smartphone owner started to download mobile apps.[7]

History

Main article: History of mobile games

Towards the end of the 20th century, mobile phone ownership became ubiquitous in the industrialised world due to the establishment of industry standards, and the rapid fall in cost of handset ownership, and use driven by

network bandwidth and operating system functionality. The first such game that demonstrated the desire for handset games was a version of Snake that Nokia had included on its devices since 1997.[8]

In 1999,

console games.[10]

Screenshot of Edge gameplay mocked up on a Sony Ericsson W880i, an early smartphone

The launch of Apple's

monetization models away from the traditional premium "pay once" model. Meanwhile, Apple's disruption caused the market to stabilized around iPhone devices and Google's Android-based phones which offered a similar app store through Google Play
.

A further major shift game with 2012's

in-app purchases to restore that stamina immediately and continue playing. This new monetization brought in millions of players to both games and millions of dollars in revenue, establishing the "freemium" model that would be a common approach for many mobile games going forward. Mobile gaming grew rapidly over the next several years, buoyed by rapid expansion in China. By 2016, top mobile games were earning over US$100 million a year, and the total revenue for the mobile games sector had surpassed that of other video game areas.[11]

Other major trends in mobile games have include the

hyper-casual game such as Flappy Bird and Crossy Road and location-based games like Pokémon Go
.

Mobile gaming has impacted the larger video game market by drawing demand away from

handheld video game consoles; both Nintendo and Sony had seen major drops in sales of their 2011 handhelds compared to their 2004 predecessors as a result of mobile gaming.[12] At the same time, mobile gaming introduced the concept of microconsoles, low-cost, low-powered home video game consoles that used mobile operating systems to take advantage of the wide variety of games available on these platforms.[13]

Calculator games

TI-83 Plus
Portal

Calculator gaming is a form of gaming in which games are played on programmable calculators, especially graphing calculators.

In 1980,

high school students for use in mathematics. The new graphing calculators, with their ability to transfer files to one another and from a computer
for backup, could double as game consoles.

Calculators such as

TI-BASIC directly on the calculator; programs could also be written in assembly language or (less often) C
on a desktop computer and transferred to the calculator. As calculators became more powerful and memory sizes increased, games increased in complexity.

By the 1990s, programmable calculators were able to run implementations by hobbyists of games such as

Dope Wars
caused controversy when students played them in school.

The look and feel of these games on an HP-48 class calculator, due to the lack of dedicated audio and video circuitry providing hardware acceleration, can at most be compared to the one offered by 8-bit handheld consoles such as the early

cell phones.[20]

Games continue to be programmed on graphing calculators with increasing complexity. A wave of games appeared after the release of the

TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus series, among TI's first graphing calculators to natively support assembly. TI-BASIC programming also rose in popularity after the release of third-party libraries. Assembly remained the language of choice for these calculators, which run on a Zilog Z80 processor, although some assembly implements have been created to ease the difficulty of learning assembly language. For those running on a Motorola 68000 processor (like the TI-89), C programming (possible using TIGCC
) has begun to displace assembly.

Because they are easy to program without outside tools, calculator games have survived despite the proliferation of

mobile devices such as mobile phones and PDAs
.

Industry structure

Total global

Asia-Pacific nations Japan and China, followed by the United States.[21] In 2012, the market had already reached $7.8 billion[22] A new report was released in November 2015 showing that 1887 app developers would make more than one million dollars on the Google and iOS app stores in 2015.[23]

Mobile gaming revenue reached $50.4 billion in 2017, occupying 43% of the entire global gaming market and poised for further growth.

console gaming in 2018.[25]

Different platforms

Main article:
Mobile software

Mobile games have been developed to run on a wide variety of platforms and technologies. These include the (today largely defunct)

iOS and Google's Android. The mobile version of Microsoft's Windows 10 (formerly Windows Phone
) is also actively supported, although in terms of market share remains marginal compared to iOS and Android.

Java was at one time the most common platform for mobile games, however its performance limits led to the adoption of various native binary formats for more sophisticated games.

Due to its ease of porting between mobile operating systems and extensive developer community, Unity is one of the most widely used engines used by modern mobile games. Apple provide a number of proprietary technologies (such as Metal) intended to allow developers to make more effective use of their hardware in iOS-native games.

Monetization

See also: Video game monetization

With the introduction of the

iOS App Store and support for in-app purchases by October 2009, the methods through which mobile games earn revenue have diverged significantly away from traditional game models on consoles or computers. Since 2009, a number of models have developed, and a mobile game developer/publisher may use one or a combination of these models to make revenue.[26]

Premium
The premium model is akin to the traditional model where the user pays for the full game upfront. Additional downloadable content may be available which can be purchased separately. Initial games released to the App Store before in-app purchases were available used this approach, and still common for many types of games.
Freemium
The freemium or "free to try" model offers a small portion of the game for free, comparable to a game demo. After completing this, the player is given the option to make a one-time in-app purchase to unlock the rest of the game. Early games shortly after the introduction of the in-app purchase feature used this approach such as Cut the Rope and Fruit Ninja.
Free-to-play
A free-to-play game requires no cost at all to play, and generally is designed to be playable from start to finish without having to spend any money into the game. However, the game will include gameplay mechanics which may slow progress towards completing the game. Commonly in mobile games, this is some form of energy or stamina that limits how many turns or actions a player can take each day. By using in-app purchases, the player can immediately restore their energy or stamina and continue on. In-app purchases can also be used to buy power-ups and other items to give the player a limited-time advantage to help complete the game. While free-to-play games had been common on computers prior to mobile, the method was popularized in mobile gaming with Candy Crush Saga and Puzzle & Dragons.
A mobile game displaying a full-screen interstitial ad for a different game
Advertising-supported
A
developer
earns revenue from the advertising network. In some cases, an in-app purchase allows the player to fully disable ads in these games.
Subscription model
A subscription-based game will offer a base version with limited features that can be played for free, but additional premium features can be obtained if the user pays a monthly subscription fee. If they terminate their subscription, they lose access to those features, though typically not any game progression related to those features, and can pick up those features later by restarting their subscription.

Many game apps are free to play through a combination of these models. Over time, mobile developers of these types of apps have observed that the bulk of their players do not spend any funds on their game, but instead revenues are generated from a small fraction, typically under 10% of their total players. Further, most of the revenue is generated by a very small fraction, about 2%, of the total players, who routinely spend large amounts of money on the game. A similar split on revenue had been seen in

browsers. These players are known as "whales", inspired by same term used for high rolling gamblers. The social nature of a mobile game has also been found to affect its revenue, as games that encourage players to work in teams or clans will lead to increased spending from engaged players.[27]

Common limits of mobile games

Mobile games tend to be small in scope (in relation to mainstream PC and console games). Storage and memory limitations (sometimes dictated at the platform level) place constraints on file size that presently rule out the direct migration of many modern PC and console games to mobile. One major problem for developers and publishers of mobile games is describing a game in such detail that it gives the customer enough information to make a purchasing decision.

Location-based mobile games

Games played on a mobile device using localization technology like

coordinate
and movement are the main elements in a location-based mobile game.

A well known example is the outdoor recreational activity of geocaching, which can be played on any mobile device with integrated or external GPS receiver.[28] External GPS receivers are usually connected via Bluetooth.[29]

Several other location-based mobile games, such as the 2001 game BotFighters, were closer to research prototypes rather than being commercial successes.

Location-based mobile games sometimes have

Pokemon Go
. Usually in these cases the augmented reality functionality is not at the center of the experience.

Augmented reality games

Main article: Augmented reality

Mobile devices have been used as a platform for Augmented reality (AR in short) games, using the device's camera(s) to as an input for the game. While playing the game, the player aims the device's camera at a location and through the device's screen, sees the area captured by the camera plus

computer-generated graphics atop it, augmenting the display and then allowing the player to interact that way.[citation needed] The graphics are generally drawn as to make the generated image appear to be part of the captured background, and will be rendered app memorizing as the player moves the device around.[citation needed] The most successful and notable example for a mobile game that has an augmented reality feature is Pokémon Go (2016), where the player travels to locations marked on their GPS map and then can enable the augmented reality mode to find Pokémon creatures to capture.[30] However, as of January 2022 there has been a lack of significant AR mobile games success since, with several AR mobile game projects being shut down, such as Microsoft's Minecraft Earth and Niantic's Catan: World Explorers[31] [32][33]

Multipurpose games

Since mobile devices have become present in the majority of households (at least in the

speech-language pathology, children's rehabilitation in hospitals (Finnish startup Rehaboo!), acquiring new useful or healthy habits (Habitica), memorizing things and learning languages (Memrise
).

There are also apps with similar purposes which are not games per se, in this case, they are called gamified apps. Sometimes it is difficult to draw a line between multipurpose games and gamified apps.

Multiplayer mobile games

Many mobile games support multiple players, either remotely over a network or locally via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or similar technology.

There are several options for playing multiplayer games on mobile phones: live

turn-based asynchronous tournaments. In live tournaments random players from around the world are matched together to compete. This is done using different networks such as Game Center, Google Play Games, and Facebook
.

In asynchronous tournaments, there are two methods used by game developers centered around the idea that players matches are recorded and then broadcast at a later time to other players in the same tournament. Asynchronous gameplay resolves the issue of needing players to have a continuous live connection. This gameplay is different since players take individual turns in the game, therefore allowing players to continue playing against human opponents.

This is done using different networks including Facebook. Some companies use a regular turn-based system where the end results are posted so all the players can see who won the tournament. Other companies take screen recordings of live players and broadcast them to other players at a later point in time to allow players to feel that they are always interacting with another human opponent.

Distribution

Mobile games can be distributed in one of four ways:

Until the launch of Apple App Store, in the US, the majority of mobile games were sold by wireless carriers, such as

Verizon Wireless, Sprint Corporation and T-Mobile US. In Europe
, games were distributed equally between carriers and off-deck, third-party stores.

After the launch of Apple App Store, the mobile OS platforms like Apple

App Store
) act as centralized digital download services from which a variety of entertainment media and software can be downloaded, including games and nowadays majority of games are distributed through them.

The popularity of mobile games has increased in the 2000s, as over US$3 billion worth of games were sold in 2007 internationally, and projected annual growth of over 40%. Ownership of a smartphone alone increases the likelihood that a consumer will play mobile games. Over 90% of smartphone users play a mobile game at least once a week.[34]

Many mobile games are distributed free to the end user, but carry paid advertising: examples are Flappy Bird and Doodle Jump. The latter follows the "freemium" model, in which the base game is free but additional items for the game can be purchased separately. Some of the most popular mobile game developers and publishers include Gameloft and King.[35][36][37]

See also

References

  1. ^
    ISBN 9789402408263
    . Retrieved 13 February 2021.
  2. ^ "This was the world's first cell phone with a game loaded". Phone Arena. 16 November 2014. Archived from the original on 22 May 2019. Retrieved 16 September 2018.
  3. ^ Blog, Microsoft Devices (2013-01-16). "10 things you didn't know about mobile gaming". Microsoft Devices Blog. Retrieved 2021-08-20.
  4. ^ Andreas Elmenthaler (Elmi). "Hagenuk MT-2000 with Tetris". Handy-sammler.de. Archived from the original on June 17, 2013. Retrieved 2013-08-12.
  5. ^ "Snake is born:a mobile gaming" (in Dutch). Nokia. Archived from the original on February 9, 2009. Retrieved 2013-08-12.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
  6. ^ "7 Nokia World Records That Will Blow Your Mind". Archived from the original on March 30, 2012. Retrieved 2013-08-12.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
  7. ^ a b Behrmann M, Noyons M, Johnstone B, MacQueen D, Robertson E, Palm T, Point J (2012). "State of the Art of the European Mobile Games Industry" (PDF). Mobile GameArch Project. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2017-05-05. Retrieved 2013-08-12.
  8. PocketGamer
    . Retrieved August 18, 2020.
  9. ^ "Mobiles: The New Gaming Platform (Big in Japan)" (PDF). Edge. No. 79 (December 1999). 24 November 1999. p. 10. Archived (PDF) from the original on 28 October 2021.
  10. ^ "Big guns join the iMode revolution" (PDF). Edge. No. 95 (March 2001). 26 February 2001. pp. 18–9. Archived (PDF) from the original on 14 July 2018.
  11. Venture Beat
    . Retrieved January 8, 2018.
  12. ^ Yang, George (June 24, 2021). "'The Little Handheld That Could': Examining The Vita's Impact A Decade Later". The Verge. Retrieved June 24, 2021.
  13. ^ Gaudiosi, John (October 16, 2014). "How Android TV is a (video) game changer". Fortune. Retrieved June 21, 2021.
  14. ISSN 0262-4079
    .
  15. ^ Porter, Matt (11 May 2019). "Episode 131 - Retro Gadgets - Part One - Casio MG-880 Music and Game Calculator". The Gadget Man: Technology News and Reviews. Retrieved 2 December 2021.
  16. ^ Jackson, Clete (October 1980). "Darth Vader's Force Battle". BYTE. pp. 50–54. Retrieved 14 June 2014.
  17. ^ Librach, Hank (February 1981). "Hunt the Wumpus with Your HP-41C". BYTE. pp. 230, 232. Retrieved 18 October 2013.
  18. ^ "Lemming Games". Xeye.org. 1997-04-06. Retrieved 2013-08-12.
  19. ^ "Le projet Doom". Hpfool.free.fr. 2001-01-07. Retrieved 2013-08-12.
  20. ^ Eric Rechlin. "HP 48 Arcade Games". Hpcalc.org. Retrieved 2013-08-12.
  21. ^ "Global mobile game industry turnover reaches $2.6 billion by 2005". 3g.co.uk. 2005-05-19. Archived from the original on 2016-03-03. Retrieved 2013-08-12.
  22. ^ "The State of Mobile Game Development". gamesindustry.biz. 28 November 2012. Retrieved 2013-11-06.
  23. ^ Salz, Peggy Anne (4 November 2015). "The Changing Economics of App Development". Harvard Business Review. Hank Boye. Retrieved 23 May 2016.
  24. ^ Wijman, Tom (28 November 2017). "New Gaming Boom: Newzoo Ups Its 2017 Global Games Market Estimate to $116.0Bn Growing to $143.5Bn in 2020". newzoo.com. Newzoo. Retrieved 12 July 2018.
  25. ^ Wijman, Tom (30 April 2018). "Mobile Revenues Account for More Than 50% of the Global Games Market as It Reaches $137.9 Billion in 2018". newzoo.com. Newzoo. Retrieved 12 July 2018.
  26. ^ McDuling, John (25 March 2014). "This simple pricing strategy has driven the phenomenal growth of mobile gaming".
  27. ^ Carmichael, Stephanie (March 14, 2013). "What it means to be a 'whale' — and why social gamers are just gamers". VentureBeat. Retrieved August 21, 2020.
  28. ^
    ISBN 978-3-7643-8414-2
  29. ^ "GPS Hardware". Teaching with GeoPads. Retrieved 2021-09-02.
  30. ^ Wingfield, Nick; Isaac, Mike (July 11, 2016). "Pokémon Go Brings Augmented Reality to a Mass Audience". The New York Times. Retrieved February 16, 2017.
  31. ^ Campbell, Ian Carlos (2021-09-17). "Niantic is shutting down its AR Catan game after a year of early access". The Verge. Retrieved 2022-01-04.
  32. ^ Webster, Andrew (2021-11-03). "There will never be another Pokémon Go". The Verge. Retrieved 2022-01-04.
  33. ^ Warren, Tom (2021-01-05). "Microsoft's ambitious Minecraft Earth game is closing down on June 30th". The Verge. Retrieved 2022-01-04.
  34. ^ Kathy Crosett (2011-03-18). "Mobile Game Marketing to Increase | Marketing Forecast from Ad-ology". Archived from the original on March 21, 2012. Retrieved 2013-08-12.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
  35. ^ Buchanan, Levi (19 September 2005). "Mobile Luminaries: Michel Guillemot". IGN. Archived from the original on 20 July 2018. Retrieved 20 July 2018.
  36. ^ "Celebrating 20 Years of Gaming Excellence: King's Milestone Journey". www.businesswire.com. 2023-09-27. Retrieved 2023-10-04.
  37. ^ Roy, Amar (12 May 2023). "5 Best Superhero Games on Mobile". Gaming.Net.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mobile_game&oldid=1217029855"