Mobile game
[1] The term also refers to all games that are played on any portable device, including from mobile phone (feature phone or smartphone), tablet, PDA to handheld game console, portable media player or graphing calculator, with and without network availability.
[6] Mobile devices became more computationally advanced allowing for downloading of games, though these were initially limited to phone carriers' own stores.
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.
[10] 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 (on a PC to be transferred to the device) or directly via the air (using GPRS, 3G or Wi-Fi).
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.
[16] Another early example is the type-in program Darth Vader's Force Battle for the TI-59, published in BYTE in October 1980.
The new graphing calculators, with their ability to transfer files to one another and from a computer for backup, could double as game consoles.
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.
Total global revenue from mobile games was estimated at $2.6 billion in 2005 by Informa Telecoms and Media.
The largest mobile gaming markets were in the Asia-Pacific nations Japan and China, followed by the United States.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
For example, mobile games can be used in speech-language pathology, children's rehabilitation in hospitals (Finnish startup Rehaboo!
Many mobile games support multiple players, either remotely over a network or locally via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or similar technology.
Some companies use a regular turn-based system where the end results are posted so all the players can see who won the tournament.
[35] Many mobile games are distributed free to the end user, but carry paid advertising: examples are Flappy Bird and Doodle Jump.
