Mobile game

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 economies of scale. As a result of this explosion, technological advancement by handset manufacturers became rapid. With these technological advances, mobile phone games also became increasingly sophisticated, taking advantage of exponential improvements in display, processing, storage, interfaces, network bandwidth and operating system functionality.

Preloaded (or embedded) games on turn-of-the-century mobile phones were usually limited to crude monochrome dot matrix graphics (or text) and single channel tones. Commands would be input via the device's keypad buttons. For a period in the early 2000s, WAP and other early mobile internet protocols allowed simple client-server games to be hosted online, which could be played through a WAP browser on devices that lacked the capability to download and run discrete applications.

With the advent of feature phones (contemporarily referred to as the 'camera phone') more hardware power became available even in bottom-of-the-range devices. Colour screens, multi-channel sound and most importantly the ability to download and store new applications (implemented in cross-industry standards such as J2ME and BREW) paved the way for commercial mobile game publishing. Some early companies utilized the camera phone technology for mobile games such as Namco and Panasonic. In 2003 Namco released a fighting game that used the cell phone's camera to create a character based on the player's profile and determined the character's speed and power based on the image taken; the character could then be sent to another friend's mobile phone to battle. That same year Panasonic released a virtual pet game in which the pet is fed by photos of foods taken with the camera phone.[6]

In the early 2000s, mobile games gained popularity in Japan's mobile phone culture, years before the United States or Europe. By 2003, a wide variety of mobile games were available on Japanese phones, ranging from puzzle games and virtual pet titles that utilized camera phone and fingerprint scanner technologies to 3D games with exceptionally high quality graphics. Older arcade-style games became particularly popular on mobile phones, which were an ideal platform for arcade-style games designed for shorter play sessions.

Nokia tried to create its own dedicated mobile gaming platform with the N-Gage in 2003 but this effort failed due to a mixture of unpopular design decisions, poor software support and competition from handheld game consoles, widely regarded as more technically advanced. The N-Gage brand was retained for a few years as a games service included on Nokia's general-purpose phones.

In Europe, downloadable mobile games were introduced by the "Les Games" portal from Orange France, run by In-fusio, in 2000. Whereas before mobile games were usually commissioned directly by handset manufacturers, now also mobile operators started to act as distributors of games. As the operators were not keen on handling potentially hundreds of relationships with one- or two-person developers, mobile aggregators and publishers started to act as a middleman between operators and developers that further reduced the revenue share seen by developers.[5]

The launch of Apple's App Store in 2008 radically changed the market. First of all, it widened consumers' opportunities to choose where to download apps; the application store on the device, operator's store or third party stores via the open internet, such as GetJar and Handango. The Apple users, however, can only use the Apple App Store, since Apple forbids the distribution of apps via any other distribution channel. Secondly, mobile developers can upload applications directly to the App Store without the typically lengthy negotiations with publishers and operators, which increased their revenue share and made mobile game development more profitable. Thirdly, the tight integration of the App Store with the device itself led many consumers to try out apps, and the games market received a considerable boost.[5]

Apple's iPod Touch and iPhone lacked a physical keyboard, unlike previous smartphones and similar devices, instead featuring a large touchscreen. This feature was adopted by rival mobile operating system Android as well, therefore becoming the most common input method for mobile games.

Consequently, the number of commercially highly successful mobile games proliferated soon after the launch of the App Store. Early App Store successes such as Angry Birds, Rolando, Flight Control, and Doodle Jump were highly publicised successes that introduced many millions of new players to mobile games and encouraged an early 'gold rush' of developers and publishers to enter the market.

In 2013, Japan was the world's largest market by revenue for mobile games.[7] The Japanese gaming market today is becoming increasingly dominated by mobile games, which generated $5.1 billion in 2013, more than traditional console games in the country.[8]

China is the largest market for mobile gaming, by both revenue and number of players.[9] Until July 2015, video game consoles were banned in the country. While personal computers were still used for gaming, the ban led to a large growth in the use of mobile phones for gaming that has persisted even after the ban was lifted. Tencent Games is the largest publisher of mobile games in the country, and due to the size of its player base within China, is known as the largest video game company in the world, measured by revenue. Tencent published King of Glory (known in Western markets as Arena of Valor), a multiplayer online battle arena that had a 200 million user base from China alone before expanding the game out into other markets.[10]

Market analysis firms identified that mobile gaming global gross revenues exceeded that of either personal computer or console games in 2016, earning around US$38 billion, and remained one of the fastest growing sectors of the video game market.[11]

Calculator games

Clone of Tetris being played on a TI-83 Plus

A fan-made game similar to the game Portal

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

An early example is the type-in program Darth Vader's Force Battle for the TI-59, published in BYTE in October 1980.[12] The magazine also published a version of Hunt the Wumpus for the HP-41C.[13] Few other games exist for the earliest of programmable calculators (including the Hewlett-Packard 9100A, one of the first scientific calculators), such as the long-popular Lunar Lander game often used as an early programming exercise. However, limited program address space and lack of easy program storage made calculator gaming a rarity even as programmables became cheap and relatively easy to obtain. It was not until the early 1990s when graphing calculators became more powerful and cheap enough to be common among 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 HP-48 and TI-82 could be programmed in proprietary programming languages such as RPL programming language or 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 Lemmings and Doom (Lemmings for HP-48 was released in 1993;[14] Doom for HP-48 was created in 1995[15]). Some 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 Game Boy or the Gameking (low resolution, monochrome or grayscale graphics), or to the built-in games of non-Java or BREW enabled cell phones.[16]

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.

Total global revenue from mobile games was estimated at $2.6 billion in 2005 by Informa Telecoms and Media. Total revenue in 2008 was $5.8 billion. The largest mobile gaming markets were in the Asia-Pacific nations Japan and China, followed by the United States.[17] In 2012, the market had already reached $7.8 billion[18] 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.[19]

Mobile gaming revenue reached $50.4 billion in 2017, occupying 43% of the entire global gaming market and poised for further growth.[20] It is expected to surpass the combined revenues from both PC gaming and console gaming in 2018.[21]

Mobile games have been developed to run on a wide variety of platforms and technologies. These include the (today largely defunct) Palm OS, Symbian, Adobe Flash Lite, NTT DoCoMo's DoJa, Sun's Java, Qualcomm's BREW, WIPI, BlackBerry, Nook and early incarnations of Windows Mobile. Today, the most widely supported platforms are Apple's 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.

A mobile game displaying a full-screen interstitial ad for a different game

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.

Typically, commercial mobile games use one of the following monetisation models: pay-per-download, subscription, free-to-play ('freemium') or advertising-supported. Until recently, the main option for generating revenues was a simple payment on downloading a game. Subscription business models also existed and had proven popular in some markets (notably Japan) but were rare in Europe. Today, a number of new business models have emerged which are often collectively referred to as "freemium". The game download itself is typically free and then revenue is generated after download either through in-app transactions or advertisements; this resulted in $34 billion spent on mobile games in 2013.[22]

Mobile games tend to be small in scope (in relation to mainstream PC and console games) and many prioritise innovative design and ease of play over visual spectacle. 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.

Games played on a mobile device using localization technology like GPS are called location-based games or location-based mobile games.[23] These are not only played on mobile hardware but also integrate the player's position into the game concept. In other words, while it does not matter for a normal mobile game where exactly the player is (play them anywhere at any time), the player's coordinate and movement are the main elements in a location-based mobile game.

A well known example is the treasure hunt game Geocaching, which can be played on any mobile device with integrated or external GPS receiver.[23] External GPS receivers are usually connected via Bluetooth. More and more mobile phones with integrated GPS are expected to come.

Several other Location-based mobile games, such as BotFighters, are in the stage of research prototypes rather than being commercial successes.

Augmented reality games, while not limited to mobile devices, are also common on newer mobile platforms where the device includes a reverse-facing camera. 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. The graphics are generally drawn as to make the generated image appear to be part of the captured background, and will be rendered appropriate as the player moves the device around. The starting location may be a special marker that is picked up by the camera and recognized by the software to determine what to present, or may be based on the location through GPS. While other augmented reality examples exist, one of the most successful is Pokémon Go where the player, using the game app, travels to locations marked on their GPS map and then uses the augmented reality mode to find Pokémon to capture.[24]

Since mobile devices have become present in the majority of households at least in the developed countries, there are more and more games created with educational or lifestyle- and health-improvement purposes. For example, mobile games can be used in speech-language pathology, children's rehabilitation in hospitals (Finnish startup Rehaboo!), acquiring new useful or healthy habits (Habitica app), memorising 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.

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 synchronous tournaments and 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+, 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 OpenFeint (now defunct) and 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.

Mobile games can be distributed in one of four ways:

• Over the Air (OTA) - a game binary file is delivered to the mobile device via wireless carrier networks.
• Sideloaded - a game binary file is loaded onto the phone while connected to a PC, either via USB cable or Bluetooth.
• Pre-installed - a game binary file is preloaded onto the device by the original equipment manufacturer (OEM).
• Mobile browser download - a game file is downloaded directly from a mobile website.

Until the launch of Apple App Store, in the US, the majority of mobile games were sold by the US wireless carriers, such as AT&T Mobility, 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 iOS, Google Android, and Microsoft Windows Phone, the mobile OS developers themselves have launched digital download storefronts that can be run on the devices using the OS or from software used on PCs. These storefronts (like Apple's iOS 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.[25]

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.

• iPod game
• Handheld electronic game
• Handheld game console
• Handheld video game
• List of highest-grossing mobile games
• List of highest-grossing video game franchises
• List of most-played mobile games by player count
• List of most-played video games by player count
• Mobile software
• Mobile gambling
• Mobile development
• Screen protector
• N-Gage (device)
• Scalable Network Application Package
• Transreality gaming