Mobile gaming today is a multi-billion dollar business. All over the world there are cybersports tournaments on mobile games, and the number of downloads of many of them in 5 minimum deposit casino uk has passed the millions.ย
How the world went from Snake and Tetris to expensive titles from big studios.
The first games
The first game appeared in 1994 on the Hagenuk MT-2000 phone. Because of the weak iron and monochrome display the choice fell on “Tetris” – one of the most popular games of the nineties. But became a cult of a completely different game – “Snake”, pre-installed in Nokia 6110 in 1997.
In this game, you had to control a snake and collect food, avoiding collisions with your own tail and the boundaries of the playing field. Each piece of food eaten made the snake longer, which in turn made the game more difficult.
Thanks to the success of the Finnish company’s signature game, every manufacturer began pre-installing the game in their phones.
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With the advent of cell phones with color displays and support for WAP (Wireless Access Protocol), it became possible to download and install new games. From 2001 to 2006, this trend is booming, and the company Nokia even released a smartphone handheld console N-Gage.
The most popular game of the early 2000s was Gravity Defied, in which the player had to ride a motorcycle, overcoming obstacles in the form of mountainous terrain, to get to the flag. The game used a special mechanism that imitates the real physical and dynamic effects of extreme racing.
In those years, games from Gameloft Studios, the authors of the popular “Asphalt” racing series, were popular. The first game in the series, Asphalt Urban GT, was released in 2004. The game featured 9 tracks, 23 licensed cars such as Lamborghini, Hummer, Volkswagen, etc., with the possibility of more than 30 upgrades.
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iPhone and Android
With the advent of the iPhone, mobile gaming became not just entertainment, but an entire industry – developers could now sell their games on the App Store, Apple’s digital store, which offered developers a 70% profit margin. Since then, the approach to mobile gaming has also changed.
On April 6, 2009, Doodle Jump, a game in which you climb as high as possible on an area similar to a checkered notebook sheet by jumping from one platform to another, appeared on the iPhone. This was made possible by the gyroscope installed in the iPhone.
An important milestone in the history of mobile gaming was Angry Birds, which came out on iOS on December 10, 2009. In the game with a slingshot it was necessary to attack pigs, which were placed on the surface or inside different structures. The Angry Birds series, which includes more than 35 games, has become a cult, spawning many side projects, including full-length cartoons.
Over time, smartphones have become productive enough to launch full-fledged and large projects. So, on December 15, 2011 Grand Theft Auto III: 10 Year Anniversary Edition was released for Android and Apple iOS platforms.
Moreover, the game came to mobile devices with improvements – textures were redesigned and HD-resolution support was added. GTA 3 on smartphones also supported gamepad control.
After GTA 3 Rockstar Games ported many great games from PC to smart phones: GTA Vice City, San Andreas, Max Payne and Bully, also releasing Liberty City Stories and Chinatown Wars. Soon other developers began to release their ports. So it became possible to play Dead Space, XCOM: Enemy Within, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords, Civilization VI, and many other major titles on the phone.
In addition to ports of previously popular titles, there are games that were released on mobile platforms at the same time as PC and consoles. Among these games is Genshin Impact, an open-world action-adventure computer game with RPG elements, developed by the Chinese company miHoYo Limited. The game is available on PC, Playstation 4 and 5, iOS and Android.
The launch of Genshin Impact has become the most successful among Chinese games. Mobile versions of the game earned about $60 million in a week, in less than two weeks the game brought its developers more than $100 million and instantly paid off.
Game Informer rated the game a 9.25 out of 10. Genshin Impact was named the game of the year 2020 by Google Play and Apple. The game was also a nominee in the categories of Best RPG and Best Mobile Game at The Game Awards 2020.
Seeing the kind of money mobile games can bring in, developers began to look more often at mobile devices as a platform. Technological advances have led to games like League of Legends: Wild Rift and PUBG MOBILE, which are being used in cybersports competitions around the world. The PUBG Mobile World League tournament in 2020, with a total prize pool of $850,000, drew more than 1.1 million spectators during the last match.
August 25, 2021 saw the release of MARVEL Future Revolution, an open-world RPG game from Marvel. The game features controls for Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, Captain Marvel, Captain America and many others. There is extensive customization of the characters’ appearance and five game modes that allow you to fight both alone and in company. The story revolves around a catastrophe that has affected all dimensions of the multiverse.
Netmarble Studios promised “the highest level of graphics among mobile games” and console-quality cutscenes. The game was developed on the Unreal Engine and is available on Android and iOS.
Today, Genshin Impact, Marvel Future Revolution and many PC ported games can offer beautiful console-level visuals and the ability to fit huge game worlds into a handheld device. This could lead to smartphones displacing consoles and gaming platforms from the market.
