History of mobile games

The history of mobile games

Prior to mobile phones

Early precursors of mobile gaming include handheld electronic games and early handheld video game consoles, though these devices were always game-oriented with nearly no utility function.

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. As most PDAs used low resolution monochromatic liquid crystal display (LCD)s designed for displaying text over graphics, these gamed tended to be simple, which included block or tile games like Tetris. These types of games carried over into some of the earlier smartphone models but did not have as much popularity, such as on the Hagenuk MT-2000 in 1993.

Introducing gaming on smartphones (1997−2006)

In 1997, Nokia introduced its Nokia 6610 smartphone which used an operating system built atop the Java Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME), allowing a variety of other applications (apps) to be run on the phone. Among the installed apps included a variation of Snake. Snake proved to be one of the phone's popular features, and Nokia continued to include the game, or a variation of it, on nearly every smartphone it released since, with about 400 million devices shipped with the game installed as of 2016.

Snake showed there was a viable interest in expanding the capabilities of smartphones for gaming applications, and further, with the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), most smartphones were capable of downloading new apps that could be purchased from their wireless carrier to use on their phone. However, at this stage, in the late 1990s, there was a wide discrepancies of technologies available in terms of both hardware and software. Phones were still of a wide ranges of form factors, input features, and screen resolutions, so game developers were typically limited to a specific brand of phones. Additionally, a range of middleware, like J2ME, Macromedia Flash Lite, DoJa, and Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless (BREW), exists, all which varied by phone brand and model, further limiting portability of games. Thus, while games were developed for mobile devices over the next several years, they tended to be limited. Further complicating mobile game visibility was how users would see these games on the wireless carrier's store page or "carrier deck", the landing page that users would arrive at when first browsing to the store. Carriers would promote certain games to the top, and while others would still be listed below, many users did not scroll beyond the carrier deck.

Meanwhile, handheld consoles still offered superior gaming experiences compared to the limited smartphone games; Nintendo had released its Game Boy Advance in 2001 as a successor to the widely popular Game Boy. To try to merge the two markets, Nokia released the N-Gage in 2003, designed as both a handheld console and a smartphone. The N-Gage was able to offer similar video games as the Advance, but even with its N-Gage QD redesign in 2004, the unit was a commercial failure.

The iPhone and the App Store (2007−2008)

Apple, Inc. had been an early player in the PDA market with the Apple Newton, but Steve Jobs had discontinued the line in 1998 to focus the company's hardware towards devices like the iMac and iPod. Under Jobs' direction, the same teams worked to develop the iPhone, which Apple first released in June 2007. Among key hardware features in the iPhone was a large random access memory (RAM) size compared to most other smartphones on the market as well as a larger screen, making it capable of running more complex apps, and a new iOS operating system that could handle multitasking, far surpassing any other device on the market at the time. The iPhone also included various sensors such as an accelerometer, and excluding the first generation, also included a capacitive touchscreen that did not require any stylus and could be controlled by a finger, later models adding support for multipoint sensing. Alongside the release, Apple affirmed that third-party apps could be developed for the phone's iOS operating system and distributed through an App Store, made available to users in July 2008; Apple made terms of using the tools and App Store low-cost and easy to use to encourage development of third-party apps.

Developers, including game developers, rushed to take advantage of the App Store. At launch, there were 500 apps, while six months later, there were over 15,000, along with over half a billion app downloads. 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. Demeter had priced the game at US$5, and within two months of launch, had made US$250,000 in profit, and Demeter was highly-publicized as a rags to riches story on the lucrative nature of developing for the iPhone. Another early success was Tap Tap Revenge, a rhythm game by Tapulous, which also was released at the App Store's launch and saw over one million downloads in 20 days. Following on similar stories, numerous smaller developers tried to release the next big game, while larger game publishers took to their existing catalogs and released mobile-compatible titles where possible.

Beyond games, the iPhone and App Phone caused most other smartphone manufacturers to abandon their own attempts to build out a more sophisticated smartphone environment, such as BlackBerry and Symbian. Only two major competitors remained after the iPhone's introduction, the Android-based devices (based on the Java language), using the operating system that had been developed by Google, and Windows Phone by Microsoft which has close interoperability with its Microsoft Windows operating system. Both took up the same approach as Apple, introducing app stores in Google Play and Windows Phone Store, respectively, with similar developer policies. 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.

Angry Birds: transitioning from premium to free-to-play (2009-2011)

As launched, the iOS App Store only allowed single-time purchases of apps akin to how one purchased music from iTunes, so most games were purchased on the traditional "premium" model, buying the game upfront. In October 2009, the store introduced "in-app purchases" (IAP), microtransactions that an app could offer with the transaction made through the App Store's storefront. Some existing app devs were savvy to jump on this; Tapulous released Tap Tap Revenge 3 shortly after this change that included IAP to obtain new songs. Similar IAPs were added to the Google Play store on Android as well.

In December 2009, Rovio Entertainment released Angry Birds on the App Store, a physics-based game involving launching cartoonish birds at structures occupied by pigs that have stolen their eggs as to do as much damage as possible, which had been inspired by the browser game Crush the Castle and others like it. 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. When Rovio ported the game to Android, they introduced an ad-supported version that could be downloaded for free, but a user could pay to remove the ads, such that Rovio gained revenue from both the IAP and the ads, which shortly after the Android's release in October 2010, was estimated to be about US$42 million a month. Another game, Cut the Rope, released on both iOS and Android at the same time, followed a model of releasing a free version with a few levels, and with an in-game purchase to unlock the rest of the game. It was one of the fastest-selling games on the iOS App Store at that time according to its publisher Chillingo.

Mobile game development was also not limited to the English-speaking world, as Japan and many Asian countries had an active mobile development scene. As the app stores on iOS and Android had regional distinctions, apps developed in different regions typically would not be available in others unless translated or localized. An important region during this period is China. 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. However, computer costs remained high and importing consoles were difficult, so many used PC bangs, giving rise to free-to-play or subscription based games like massively multiplayer online games (MMOs). 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.

Candy Crush Saga and Puzzle & Dragons: Establishing the freemium model (2012-2014)

While casual games like Angry Birds and Cut the Rope were gaining success on mobile devices, the development of new social network sites using advanced web browser technology on personal computers, such as Facebook, gave rise to free-to-play browser games and social-network games, generally supported by ads on the hosting website. One of the most notable examples of these is Zynga's FarmVille, released in 2009. The farm management simulation game had the player work to raise crop and tend livestock on a virtual farm, but were only afforded a limited number of actions per day. Players, however, could engage their Facebook friends to ask for extra actions, and give extra actions back when requested. The "time-lapse" or "energy" gameplay mechanics was heavily criticized by traditional game designers since any reasonable progression required one to commit time to the game. However, the game was considered highly successful, with more than 80 million players by February 2010.

Zygna's success with Farmville drew gamers away from non-social browser games on portal sites. King, who ran one such portal site, was impacted by this and decided to change their own model to incorporate Facebook games that worked alongside their portal games. One of the first games King offered on this approach was Bubble Witch Saga, released in October 2011. Bubble Witch Saga used mechanics similar to the older game Puzzle Bobble, where players shot colored orbs to clear away matching orbs. 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. The player had a number of turns (shots) to clear the board or meet other conditions. If they did this, they were able to continue, but otherwise they lose one "life", though these lives would regenerated in real-time, or players could ask friends on Facebook for free lives. The game thus only required the player to commit a few minutes each day. By January 2012, Bubble Witch Saga had over 10 million players and was the fastest-growing game on Facebook. King followed this with Candy Crush Saga on its portal and Facebook by April 2012, a more direct tile-matching game but using the same "saga" approach, which also enjoyed similar success.

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. Both games still integrated with Facebook to ask their friends for lives, but also included an in-app purchase to fully restore one's lives or on special powerup, however, the game was still designed to be playable without having to purchase these, and 70% of the players had been able to make it to the final level of the game (as of September 2013) without spending any money. Candy Crush Saga proved to be the more popular game, and by the end of 2013, King had seen over 400 million new players of the game and their revenues had jumped from US$62 million in 2011 to US$1.88 billion from advertising revenue and in-app purposes. In June 2013, King opted to eliminate advertising in-game and simply let the mobile version of its games earn revenue from in-app purchases as they continued to release additional games. The strategy proved effective as by the final quarter of 2014, King had seen 356 million monthy unique players, with only 8.3 million spending money on their games (2.3%), but had brought in over US$23.42 per player per month, as to make over US$580 million across its game portfolio that quarter. King's success with Candy Crush Saga created the freemium model that numerous mobile games that followed used.

Separately, in Japan, developer GungHo Online Entertainment had released Puzzle & Dragons in February 2012 first in JApan, a tile-matching game with some role-playing elements that including improving one's team of "monsters". 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. Like Candy Crush Saga, the game used regenerable "stamina" to limit how many times the player could play in a row, but could use in-app purchases to immediately restore their stamina, or obtain other forms of in-game currency. By October 2013 the game has been downloaded 20 million times in Japan (about 1/6th of the nation's population) and over a million times in North America, and was earning an estimated US$3.75 million a day. 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.

In 2013, Apple was able to secure deals to distribute the iPhone cheaply in China. Because of the feature set and its relatively low cost compared to a computer, the iPhone became nearly ubiquitous for many Chinese residents. This spurred mobile game development within China particularly across the 2013-2014 period. 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. This also led to some of the larger publishers within China, such as Tencent and Perfect World Games to establish foreign subsidiaries or acquire foreign companies to make them subsidaries for mobile game development.