Mobile game
A mobile game is a video game that is typically played on a mobile device. The term also refers to all games that are played on any portable device, including from mobile phone, tablet, PDA to handheld game console, portable media player or graphing calculator, with and without network availability.
The earliest known game on a mobile phone was a Tetris variant on the Hagenuk MT-2000 device from 1994.
In 1997, Nokia launched Snake. Snake, which was pre-installed in most mobile devices manufactured by Nokia for a couple of years, has since become one of the most played games, at one point found on more than 350 million devices worldwide. Mobile devices became more computationally advanced allowing for downloading of games, though these were initially limited to phone carriers' own stores. Mobile gaming grew greatly with the development of app stores in 2008, such as the iOS App Store from Apple. As the first mobile content marketplace operated directly by a mobile-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.
Mobile gaming is the largest and most lucrative sector of the video game industry today, accounting for 49% of total global gaming revenue in 2025.
History
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. 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.In 1999, NTT Docomo launched the i-mode mobile platform in Japan, allowing mobile games to be downloaded onto smartphones. Several Japanese video game developers announced games for the i-mode platform that year, such as Konami announcing its dating simulation Tokimeki Memorial. The same year, Nintendo and Bandai were developing mobile phone adapters for their handheld game consoles, the Game Boy Color and WonderSwan, respectively. By 2001, i-mode had users in Japan, along with more advanced handsets with graphics comparable to 8-bit consoles. A wide variety of games were available for the i-mode service, along with announcements from established video game developers such as Taito, Konami, Namco, and Hudson Soft, including ports of classic arcade games and 8-bit console games.
By the mid-2000s there was a large market for mobile games, of which many were built on the Java ME platform that many devices at the time supported. Earlier they could be obtained using SMS short codes before manufacturers as well as mobile network operators started offering them for download both on the Web or directly via the air. The launch of Apple's iPhone in 2007 and the App Store in 2008 radically changed the market. The iPhone's focus on larger memory, multitasks, and additional sensing devices, including the touchscreen in later model, made it ideal for casual games, while the App Store, which is also independent from mobile carriers, made it easy for developers to create and post apps to publish, and for users to search for and obtain new games. Further, the App Store added the ability to support in-app purchases in October 2009. This allowed games like Angry Birds and Cut the Rope to find new 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 Candy Crush Saga and Puzzle & Dragons, games that used a stamina-like gameplay feature found in social-network games like FarmVille to limit the number of times one could play it in a single period, but allowed optional 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 a year, and the total revenue for the mobile games sector had surpassed that of other video game areas.
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. 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.
Calculator games
Calculator gaming is a form of gaming in which games are played on programmable calculators, especially graphing calculators.In 1980, Casio's MG-880 pocket calculator had a built-in "Invaders" game, released in the Summer that year. Another early example is the type-in program Darth Vader's Force Battle for the TI-59, published in BYTE in October 1980. The magazine also published a version of Hunt the Wumpus for the HP-41C. Few other games exist for the earliest of programmable 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 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. 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, or to the built-in games of non-Java or BREW enabled cell phones.
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, C programming 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. In 2012, the market had already reached $7.8 billion 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.
Mobile gaming revenue reached $50.4 billion in 2017, occupying 43% of the entire global gaming market and poised for further growth. It is expected to surpass the combined revenues from both PC gaming and console gaming in 2018.
Different platforms
Mobile games have been developed to run on a wide variety of platforms and technologies. These include the 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 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 provides a number of proprietary technologies intended to allow developers to make more effective use of their hardware in iOS-native games.