History of mobile games

By the early 2000s, the technical specifications of Western handsets had also matured to the point where downloadable applications (including games) could be supported, but mainstream adoption continued to be hampered by market fragmentation between different devices, operating environments, and distributors.

A major transition in game monetization came with the introduction of Candy Crush Saga and Puzzle & Dragons, taking gameplay concepts from social-network games which generally required the player to wait some length of time after exhausting a number of turns for a day, and offering the use of in-app purchases to refresh their energy.

[1] Personal digital assistants (PDAs), precursors themselves to modern smartphones, arrived in 1984, and early models included built-in or add-ons games such as with the Sharp Wizard in 1989.

Phones were still of a wide ranges of form factors, input features, and screen resolutions, so game developers were typically focused their efforts on specific software platforms and subsets of available devices.

Additionally, a range of software platform standards, like J2ME, Macromedia Flash Lite, DoJa, and Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless (BREW), existed, the implementations of which varied by phone manufacturer and model, further limiting portability of games.

As a result, games promoted by carriers (thereby appearing nearer the top of the store) tended to be greatly more successful, while others listed below would not be seen by many users who did not scroll beyond the first page of the deck.

A wide array of various genres were tried, including virtual pet games which used early camera phone features as part of the gameplay cycle.

[12] One such early success was Trism, a tile-matching game incorporating the phone's accelerometer released near the App Store launch developed by a single person, Steve Demeter.

[6] Ultimately, Microsoft ceased active development of Windows Phone, leaving iOS and Android as the principle players in the mobile operating system and app store market.

[21] As released on the iOS store, it was a still a premium game at US$0.99, and its low cost, as well as being featured by Apple in February 2010, led to it becoming highly successful and leading the Top Paid App charts by mid-2010.

Separate from most other markets, the Chinese video game industry had been relatively small prior to 2008 due to poor economic conditions.

The Chinese government set about trying to improve the economic welfare of the country and introduce more high technology education and jobs.

China is also recognized for creating social-network games with Happy Farm, developed by 5 Minutes in 2008, which served as direct inspiration for FarmVille.

However, as to avoid the drawn-out gameplay that FarmVille was noted for, King introduced the "saga" model; the game was divided into a number of levels which each was effectively a puzzle.

[36] Buoyed by the success of these games, King opted to enter the mobile game market with these titles, developing ad-supported versions for iOS that synchronized with the portal and Facebook versions; Bubble Witch Saga for mobile was released in July 2012, and Candy Crush Saga in October 2012.

At the time of its release, one of the more popular mobile apps in Japan were card battle games, but GungHo believed they could improve on the formula.

News of these numbers caused GungHo's stock market capitalization to rise sharply in October as to surpass that of Nintendo at around US$15.1 billion, and further establishing the success of the freemium model for mobile games.

[46] These games followed the established freemium models from Candy Crush Saga and Puzzle & Dragons, using a mix of advertising and in-app purchases for revenue generation.

Chinese publishers and developers, though limited by the type of content that they can release within the country due to the government's oversight of the media, were able to publish their games to the mobile app stores to release their titles beyond China, including to other southeast Asian countries or globally when possible, which helped to draw in additional revenue.

By September 2014, the app was earning US$5.15 million per day, and many users had reported playing the game for thousands of hours since its launch.

Tencent saw the potential for its global release, but replace the game's heavy Chinese mythology with more traditional fantasy characters in rebranding it to Arena.

[52][53] With its international release, Honor and Arena and combined have remained one of the top-grossing mobile games overall, with over US$1.6 billion in annual revenue in 2019.

The game's monetization scheme was designed to avoid some of the bad reputation that in-app purchasing had been getting in recent years, using the lure of new characters to get players to spend money rather than to extend gameplay sessions.

[63] Other location-based games based on popular properties have since been released with similar gameplay and monetization models, including Harry Potter: Wizards Unite and Minecraft Earth.

Fortnite Battle Royale rapidly grew popular, leading Epic to port the game to other systems, including onto mobile devices by mid-2018.

[67][68][69][70] Notably, Epic Games challenged the requirement from both Apple and Google that in-game purchases had to be made through the specific storefront.

Currently, due to restrictions Apple has on iOS applications, these cloud streaming services are only targeted at Android phones and devices.

The COVID-19 pandemic in 2019 and 2020 caused many people around the globe to be quarantined or forced to stay at home to prevent transmission of the virus, and video games became a popular pastime.

Mobile game saw a significant boost in revenues as a result of the pandemic, with a 40% increase year-to-year in the second quarter of 2020 according to Sensor Tower.

[74] Mobile-friendly games such as Among Us and Genshin Impact, alongside Fortnite and other mobile titles, saw large player counts during the pandemic period.