Smartphones are by no means the only way to play games today. PC gaming systems are hotter than they have ever been, while the traditional console still remains the most popular way to play for a lot of people. However, smartphone gaming is the largest segment of gaming, both in terms of players and revenue, with over 2.8 billion people playing on their phones worldwide. Whether you’re interested in joining them, or you simply want to know why smartphone gaming got so popular, let’s look at how it’s totally changed the gaming landscape and even given rise to whole new genres of games.
Bringing New Audiences Into Gaming
Despite the stereotypes, girls have always been into gaming. 72% of women play video games, which isn’t a much lower portion compared to men, despite how often the gaming space can feel unfriendly to them. However, that didn’t stop smartphone games from targeting women in ways that console and PC game companies always seemed to have trouble with. The market of games for adult women has grown tremendously with genres like murder mysteries and environmental puzzles proving particularly popular, which is largely because they are marketing that way. Smartphones have also separately opened the way for casual gamers in a way like never before, with games like Candy Crush and Clash Of Clans able to appeal to players of all skill levels.
Gaming Made Convenient
The way that people game on their smartphones has changed how creators make games, as well. Most people are not willing to drop as much on a smartphone game as they would a new console release. In fact, most people don’t buy games for their phones at all. As such, phones tend to be built around different models of monetization, with most of them being free, but offering additional lives or features to those who are willing to spend some money on in-app purchases. Others are entirely free but for ads that play now and then. The freemium model makes mobile gaming much more accessible.
Gaming Made Accessible
While it’s important to recognize that gaming has been made available to people across the board because of the convenience and the lower costs of smartphone gaming, there is one group that possibly benefits the most from its evolution. Gaming for people with disabilities has always been more limited, even as games evolve their accessibility offerings. However, mobile games have often been among the first to include features for gamers with disabilities, such as colour-blind modes, font sizes, assistive touch controls, and more. Many of these features then go on to be adopted by bigger gaming studios making console blockbusters. Mobile gaming often paves the way for advances beyond gameplay alone.
Gaming Sessions Get Shorter
There’s no shortage of smartphone games that allow you to spend hours grinding, working through levels, and exploring worlds. However, because smartphone games can be played anywhere and started in moments, they do lend themselves to short gaming sessions, as well. As such, there are a lot of games that are designed to be played in minutes, such as mobile versions of backgammon, sudoku, and other puzzle and strategy games. In fact, mobile gaming has brought back a lot of card and board games that have faded from prominence over time, showing to be the platform that best suits their mechanics. This makes it easy to slot a gaming session into a coffee break at work or on your morning commute on the train or bus.
Rise Of The Mobile Blockbuster
Not all games on phones are simple or particularly inexpensive to make, however. In recent years, there has been a surge of smartphone games with graphics and mechanics that can rival console games. In fact, many of these games are also on consoles, as well. Games like Genshin Impact, Zenless Zone Zero, or Infinity Nikki, which just reached 20 million downloads in its first week of release, are visually impressive, mechanically rich, and offer tons of content to play through. A lot of these games stlll operate on a freemium model, as well, using “gacha” mechanics to allow players to earn or buy tokens that can be used to unlock random characters, accessories, or outfits.
A Playground For New Technology
Gaming is a space that always evolves with the technology that is available to it. While console games often have to wait for the next generation of consoles for their big technological leaps, and PC games often have to err on the side of being accessible to all, the latest smartphone games often follow the trends in technology development. For instance, mobile games are the first to benefit from the reduced latency and faster loading times provided by 5G gaming. Mobile games also offer AR and VR gaming experiences. Their screens can act as the window to an augmented reality, such as with Pokemon GO, which uses smartphone cameras and GPS to create a game overlay that fits over the real world.
The Birth Of New Genres
It is hard to identify exactly where certain genres began, especially since smartphone games are largely an evolution of the casual gaming trends that started with Flash games back in the day. Despite that, there are definitely genres that have become popularized by smartphones. Gacha games, as mentioned, were largely considered the domain of smartphone freemium games until they started being used in games on consoles. Tower defense games were a Flash genre initially, but grew to their most popular on smartphones. Nowadays, there are several games, like Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess and Orcs Must Die that follow the tower defense rules but in full-fledge console games. Battle royale games, such as Fortnite, are massively popular on mobile, as well. Cross-platform game design allows these to be played with players across different platforms, too.
The Mobile-ification Of Gaming
The revolutions that have begun in the smartphone space have not stayed relegated to that space, at all. The wider gaming landscape has followed mobile gaming trends more than once. Some would say that the indie gaming landscape is as big as it is because a lot of players got used to shorter games with less impressive graphics thanks to smartphone games. A lot of freemium models have been taken directly from mobile games, as well. Gacha mechanics are put in use even in paid games as a way to randomize how players unlock things in those games. Of course, some of the biggest games designed for smartphones are also playable on PC and consoles, too, like the aforementioned Genshin Impact or Infinity Nikki.
Smartphones As A New Traditional Platform
Smartphones are not just a place for games that are traditionally considered “mobile games,” either. Evolutions in technology, such as Cloud game streaming, have allowed phones to be used to play games that were even developed for the latest consoles. What’s more, ports of classic games, as well as emulation, has allowed gamers to use phones as their primary gaming devices for years now. There are even accessories that people get to turn their games into a makeshift console with traditional controls. The lines between mobile gaming and other platforms are only likely to get thinner and thinner as time goes on.
Mobile gaming is not going anywhere anytime soon. If anything, it just keeps growing into a more impressive and creative space. If you’re a gamer of any stripe, then don’t underestimate what your smartphone has to offer you, as well.
Leave A Comment