The gaming industry is growing due to mobile games

Sotelo BrentBlog

Mobile phones have long evolved from being a means of communication to being multi-functional multimedia devices capable of satisfying so many of their owners’ needs, whether it’s music, video, Internet access or games.In the gaming industry, mobile entertainment is at the forefront, second only to PC games.

The graph shows a selection of the duration of the most popular mobile games:

A bit of history

The appearance of the first game in mobile phones dates back to the distant 1997, when the Finnish company Nokia first implemented the simple game Snake in one of its models.The success of this game turned out to be as stunning as it was important for the future fate of the mobile gaming industry in general.The Snake itself has become a truly cult game.

Following Nokia, other manufacturers began to pre-install games in their models, which led to a gradual reorientation of mobile phones towards entertainment – after all, games appeared on phones long before FM radio, audio players and other multimedia features.

Mobile gaming industry today

The mobile gaming market is growing so fast that it is projected to grow into a $100 billion industry by 2021, while conventional video games will barely top $32 billion.

A significant impact on the development of mobile games was made by the progress in the development of the mobile Internet (first the emergence of WAP, and then GPRS, EDGE and, in recent years, the development of 3G and 4G networks).This made it possible to simplify the ways of delivering mobile content to the user, and also divided the once monolithic composition of the participants in the mobile gaming market.Today, mobile games can be divided intopre-installed ,downloadable, andbrowser-based (all online entertainment).

Depending on the number of participants, mobile games today can be divided into single-player and multiplayer.In fairness, it should be noted that despite the development of mobile technologies, the network mode of most games is not thought out, which leads to a loss of interest among a fairly large category of mobile players.

Despite this, the mobile games market will develop rapidly, and due to many factors:

  • first of all, the actualmobility(the ability to play whenever and wherever);
  • continuousdevelopment of mobile phones(both hardware capabilities, such as increasing the amount of RAM, increasing the power of mobile device processors, and improving data transmission channels – in particular, the introduction of third-generation networks that provide much higher content transfer rates);
  • a large number ofmobile phone users, which allows counting on a wide audience of potential mobile players;
  • changingattitudes towards mobile games, as well asfashionfor certain types of games;
  • support for participants in themedia and advertising industry.
  • At the same time, there are a number of problems.Among the shortcomings hindering the development of the gaming industry for cell phones:
    • the problemof piracy;
    • technological limitations ofthe mobile platform;
    • pricing(which is especially typical for the Russian market);
    • low proportion of mobile gamerscompared to the general audience of cell phone users;
    • low quality ofmany mobile games (which is especially noticeable among branded games developed under licenses from film and media companies).

    Due to the huge amount of content on Google Play and the App Store, it can be difficult to find a real game.This is the main problem when there are hundreds of clones with almost identical icons and names.The easiest way to understand this is to highlight the key players in the mobile market.

    The main players in the market developing applications for various software platforms are companies such asGameloft,Glu Mobile(the mobile division of EA Mobile),Voodoo,King,Supercell, domestic developersPlayrixandHerocraft, besides them there are many other software companies.

The most popular and profitable games

The SensorTower analytical platform is engaged in studying the mobile market and every year publishes reports on the most profitable and most downloaded applications.Based on their data, you can see which games are most played on mobile devices.

The number of downloads is of course important, but developers are more focused on what makes money.In any case, the mobile games market will constantly change.The arrival of large companies can create the right level of competition to improve the quality of the industry.And the mobile games themselves can change beyond recognition in just a few years.

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