mobile game screenshot of edge gameplay mocked up on a sony ericsson w880i mobile phone part of a series onvideo games platforms arcade game console game game console home console electronic game audio game electronic handheld handheld game handheld console mobile game online game social network game pc game linux mac genres action beat em up fighting platform shooter survival actionadventure stealth survival horror adventure interactive fiction interactive movie visual novel roleplaying action roleplaying tactical roleplaying simulation construction and management life simulation sports vehicle strategy multiplayer online battle arena realtime strategy realtime tactics turnbased strategy turnbased tactics massively multiplayer online lists arcade video games bestselling video games bestselling video game franchises highestgrossing video game franchises mostplayed video games by player count mostplayed mobile games by player count highestgrossing arcade games video games considered among the best game of the year awards video games notable for negative reception development game ai game design interaction design game programming level design video game art video game design video game graphics video game music vte a mobile game is a game played on a feature phone smartphonetablet smartwatch pda portable media player or graphing calculator the earliest known game on a mobile phone was a tetris variant on the hagenuk mt2000 device from 1994 in 1997 nokia launched the very successful snake a variant of the snake game for the nokia 6110 using the infrared port was also the first twoplayer game for mobile phones today mobile games are usually downloaded from app stores as well as from mobile operators portals but in some cases are also preloaded in the handheld devices by the oem or by the mobile operator when purchased via infrared connection bluetooth memory card or side loaded onto the handset with a cable downloadable mobile games were first commercialised in japan circa the launch of ntt docomos imode platform in 1999 and by the early 2000s were available through a variety of platforms throughout asia europe north america and ultimately most territories where modern carrier networks and handsets were available by the mid2000s however mobile games distributed by mobile operators and third party portals channels initially developed to monetise downloadable ringtones wallpapers and other small pieces of content using premium sms or direct carrier charges as a billing mechanism remained a marginal form of gaming until apples ios app store was launched in 2008 as the first mobile content marketplace operated directly by a mobile platform holder the app store significantly changed the consumer behaviour and quickly broadened the market for mobile games as almost every smartphone owner started to download mobile apps history towards the end of the 20th century mobile phone ownership became ubiquitous in the industrialised world due to the establishment of industry standards and the rapid fall in cost of handset ownership and use driven by economies of scale as a result of this explosion technological advancement by handset manufacturers became rapid 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 preloaded or embedded games on turnofthecentury mobile phones were usually limited to crude monochrome dot matrix graphics or text and single channel tones commands would be input via the devices keypad buttons for a period in the early 2000s wap and other early mobile internet protocols allowed simple clientserver games to be hosted online which could be played through a wap browser on devices that lacked the capability to download and run discrete applications with the advent of feature phones contemporarily referred to as the camera phone more hardware power became available even in bottomoftherange devices colour screens multichannel sound and most importantly the ability to download and store new applications implemented in crossindustry standards such as j2me and brew paved the way for commercial mobile game publishing some early companies utilized the camera phone technology for mobile games such as namco and panasonic in 2003 namco released a fighting game that used the cell phones camera to create a character based on the players profile and determined the characters speed and power based on the image taken the character could then be sent to another friends mobile phone to battle that same year panasonic released a virtual pet game in which the pet is fed by photos of foods taken with the camera phone in the early 2000s mobile games gained popularity in japans mobile phone culture years before the united states or europe by 2003 a wide variety of mobile games were available on japanese phones ranging from puzzle games and virtual pet titles that utilized camera phone and fingerprint scanner technologies to 3d games with exceptionally high quality graphics older arcadestyle games became particularly popular on mobile phones which were an ideal platform for arcadestyle games designed for shorter play sessions nokia tried to create its own dedicated mobile gaming platform with the ngage in 2003 but this effort failed due to a mixture of unpopular design decisions poor software support and competition from handheld game consoles widely regarded as more technically advanced the ngage brand was retained for a few years as a games service included on nokias generalpurpose phones in europe downloadable mobile games were introduced by the les games portal from orange france run by infusio in 2000 whereas before mobile games were usually commissioned directly by handset manufacturers now also mobile operators started to act as distributors of games as the operators were not keen on handling potentially hundreds of relationships with one or twoperson developers mobile aggregators and publishers started to act as a middleman between operators and developers that further reduced the revenue share seen by developers the launch of apples app store in 2008 radically changed the market first of all it widened consumers opportunities to choose where to download apps the application store on the device operators store or third party stores via the open internet such as getjar and handango the apple users however can only use the apple app store since apple forbids the distribution of apps via any other distribution channel secondly mobile developers can upload applications directly to the app store without the typically lengthy negotiations with publishers and operators which increased their revenue share and made mobile game development more profitable thirdly the tight integration of the app store with the device itself led many consumers to try out apps and the games market received a considerable boost apples ipod touch and iphone lacked a physical keyboard unlike previous smartphones and similar devices instead featuring a large touchscreen this feature was adopted by rival mobile operating system android as well therefore becoming the most common input method for mobile games consequently the number of commercially highly successful mobile games proliferated soon after the launch of the app store early app store successes such as angry birds rolando flight control doodle jump were highly publicised successes that introduced many millions of new players to mobile games and encouraged an early gold rush of developers and publishers to enter the market in 2013 japan was the worlds largest market by revenue for mobile games china is the largest market for mobile gaming by both revenue and number of players market analysis firms identified that mobile gaming global gross revenues exceeded that of either personal computer or console games in 2016 earning around us38 billion and remained one of the fastest growing sectors of the video game market calculator games clone of tetris being played on a ti83 plus a fanmade game similar to the game portal calculator gaming is a form of gaming in which games are played on programmable calculators especially graphing calculators an early example is the typein program darth vaders force battle for the ti59 published in byte in october 1980 few other games exist for the earliest of programmable calculators including the hewlettpackard 9100a one of the first scientific calculators including the longpopular lunar lander game often used as an early programming exercise however limited program address space and lack of easy program storage made calculator gaming a rarity even as programmables became cheap and relatively easy to obtain it wasnt until the early 1990s when graphing calculators became more powerful and cheap enough to be common among high school students for use in mathematics the new graphing calculators with their ability to transfer files to one another and from a computer for backup could double as game consoles calculators such as hp48 and ti82 could be programmed in proprietary programming languages such as rpl programming language or tibasic directly on the calculator programs could also be written in assembly language or less often c on a desktop computer and transferred to the calculator as calculators became more powerful and memory sizes increased games increased in complexity by the 1990s programmable calculators were able to run implementations by hobbyists of games such as lemmings and doom lemmings for hp48 was released in 1993 some games such as dope wars caused controversy when students played them in school the look and feel of these games on an hp48 class calculator due to the lack of dedicated audio and video circuitry providing hardware acceleration can at most be compared to the one offered by 8bit handheld consoles such as the early game boy or the gameking low resolution monochrome or grayscale graphics or to the builtin games of nonjava or brew enabled cell phones games continue to be programmed on graphing calculators with increasing complexity a wave of games appeared after the release of the ti83 plusti84 plus series among tis first graphing calculators to natively support assembly tibasic programming also rose in popularity after the release of thirdparty libraries assembly remained the language of choice for these calculators which run on a zilog z80 processor although some assembly implements have been created to ease the difficulty of learning assembly language for those running on a motorola 68000 processor like the ti89 c programming possible using tigcc has begun to displace assembly because they are easy to program without outside tools calculator games have survived despite the proliferation of mobile devices such as mobile phones and pdas industry structure total global revenue from mobile games was estimated at 26 billion in 2005 by informa telecoms and media total revenue in 2008 was 58 billion the largest mobile gaming markets were in the asiapacific nations japan and china followed by the united states mobile gaming revenue reached 504 billion in 2017 occupying 43 of the entire global gaming market and poised for further growth different platforms mobile software mobile games have been developed to run on a wide variety of platforms and technologies these include the today largely defunct palm os symbian adobe flash lite ntt docomos doja suns java qualcomms brew wipi blackberry nook and early incarnations of windows mobile today the most widely supported platforms are apples ios and googles android the mobile version of microsofts windows 10 formerly windows phone is also actively supported although in terms of market share remains marginal compared to ios and android java was at one time the most common platform for mobile games however its performance limits led to the adoption of various native binary formats for more sophisticated games due to its ease of porting between mobile operating systems and extensive developer community unity is one of the most widely used engines used by modern mobile games apple provide a number of proprietary technologies such as metal intended to allow developers to make more effective use of their hardware in iosnative games a mobile game displaying a fullscreen interstitial ad for a different game typically commercial mobile games use one of the following monetisation models payperdownload subscription freetoplay freemium or advertisingsupported until recently the main option for generating revenues was a simple payment on downloading a game subscription business models also existed and had proven popular in some markets notably japan but were rare in europe today a number of new business models have emerged which are often collectively referred to as freemium the game download itself is typically free and then revenue is generated after download either through inapp transactions or advertisements this resulted in 34 billion spent on mobile games in 2013 common limits of mobile games mobile games tend to be small in scope in relation to mainstream pc and console games and many prioritise innovative design and ease of play over visual spectacle 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 one major problem for developers and publishers of mobile games is describing a game in such detail that it gives the customer enough information to make a purchasing decision locationbased mobile games games played on a mobile device using localization technology like gps are called locationbased games or locationbased mobile games these are not only played on mobile hardware but also integrate the players position into the game concept in other words while it does not matter for a normal mobile game where exactly you are play them anywhere at any time the players coordinate and movement are main elements in a locationbased mobile game a well known example is the treasure hunt game geocaching which can be played on any mobile device with integrated or external gps receiver besides geocaching there exist several other locationbased mobile games such as botfighters which are rather in the stage of research prototypes than a commercial success augmented reality games augmented reality games while not limited to mobile devices are also common on newer mobile platforms where the device includes a reversefacing camera while playing the game the player aims the devices camera at a location and through the devices screen sees the area captured by the camera plus computergenerated graphics atop it augmenting the display and then allowing the player to interact that way the graphics are generally drawn as to make the generated image appear to be part of the captured background and will be rendered appropriate as the player moves the device around the starting location may be a special marker that is picked up by the camera and recognized by the software to determine what to present or may be based on the location through gps while other augmented reality examples exist one of the most successful is pokmon go where the player using the game app travels to locations marked on their gps map and then uses the augmented reality mode to find pokmon to capture multipurpose games since mobile devices have become present in the majority of households at least in the developed countries there are more and more games created with educational or lifestyle and healthimprovement purposes for example mobile games can be used in speechlanguage pathology example outloud apps childrens rehabilitation in hospitals finnish startup rehaboo acquiring new useful or healthy habits habitica app memorising things and learning languages memrise there are also apps with similar purposes which are not games per se in this case they are called gamified apps sometimes it is difficult to draw a line between multipurpose games and gamified apps multiplayer mobile games many mobile games support multiple players either remotely over a network or locally via wifi bluetooth or similar technology there are several options for playing multiplayer games on mobile phones live synchronous tournaments and turnbased asynchronous tournaments in live tournaments random players from around the world are matched together to compete this is done using different networks including game center google mobango nextpeer and facebook in asynchronous tournaments there are two methods used by game developers centered around the idea that players matches are recorded and then broadcast at a later time to other players in the same tournament asynchronous gameplay resolves the issue of needing players to have a continuous live connection this gameplay is different since players take individual turns in the game therefore allowing players to continue playing against human opponents this is done using different networks including openfeint now defunct and facebook some companies use a regular turn based system where the end results are posted so all the players can see who won the tournament other companies take screen recordings of live players and broadcast them to other players at a later point in time to allow players to feel that they are always interacting with another human opponent infrared older mobile phones supporting mobile gaming have infrared connectivity for data sharing with other phones or pcs bluetooth some mobile games are connected through bluetooth using special hardware the games are designed to communicate with each other through this protocol to share game information the basic restriction is that both the users have to be within a limited distance to get connected a bluetooth device can accept up to 7 connections from other devices using a clientserver architecture 3g 3g allows in most cases realtime multiplayer gaming and is based on technologies faster than gprs 4g and wifi 4g allows very fast data rates combined with low stalls and is based on technologies faster than 3g wifi is often used for connecting at home distribution mobile games can be distributed in one of four ways over the air ota a game binary file is delivered to the mobile device via wireless carrier networks sideloaded a game binary file is loaded onto the phone while connected to a pc either via usb cable or bluetooth preinstalled a game binary file is preloaded onto the device by the original equipment manufacturer oem mobile browser download a game file is downloaded directly from a mobile website until the launch of apple app store in the us the majority of mobile games were sold by the us wireless carriers such as att mobility verizon wireless sprint corporation and tmobile us in europe games were distributed equally between carriers such as orange and vodafone and offdeck third party stores such as jamba kalador and gameloft after the launch of apple app store the mobile os platforms like apple ios google android and microsoft windows phone the mobile os developers themselves have launched digital download storefronts that can be run on the devices using the os or from software used on pcs these storefronts like apples ios app store act as centralized digital download services from which a variety of entertainment media and software can be downloaded including games and nowadays majority of games are distributed through them the popularity of mobile games has increased in the 2000s as over 3 billion usd worth of games were sold in 2007 internationally and projected annual growth of over 40 ownership of a smartphone alone increases the likelihood that a consumer will play mobile games over 90 of smartphone users play a mobile game at least once a week many mobile games are distributed free to the end user but carry paid advertising examples are flappy bird and candy crush saga the latter follows the freemium model in which the base game is free but additional items for the game can be purchased separately ipod game handheld electronic game handheld game console handheld video game list of bestselling mobile games list of highestgrossing video game franchises list of mostplayed video games by player count mobile software mobile gambling mobile development screen protector ngage device scalable network application package transreality gaming vtemobile phonesgeneral features gsm services history operating system security telephony airplane mode text messaging sms mms rcs spam tracking web browsing html5 softwareapps development distribution management cloud computing commerce banking marketing advertising campaigns payments contactless donating ticketing content blogging email gambling gaming health instant messaging learning music news search local social address book television culture charms comics dating japanese culture novels ringtones silent mode selfie txtspk wallpaper devices manufacturers 3d phone camera phone car phone feature phone projector phone satellite phone smartphone sim lock form factors bar flip phablet slider smartwatch smartphones android devices rooting blackberry 10 iphone ios jailbreaking opensource mobile phones symbian devices windows phone devices environment and health blackberry thumb driving safety electronic waste external power supply phantom vibration syndrome radiation and health recycling law carrier iq use restrictions while driving legality of recording by civilians photography and the law telephone tapping texting while driving mobile phones in prison networking channel capacity frequencies multiband network operator list roaming signal sim dual sim standards comparison tethering voip wap xhtmlmp generations 0g 1g 2g 3g adoption 35g 4g 45g 5g vtemobile operating systemslinuxkernel android forks bada ezx linux firefox os b2g os kaios maemo maemo leste meego mer sailfish os moblin motomagx openembedded ngstrm kaeilos openmoko linux qtmoko shr postmarketos tizen ubuntu touch ubports webos luneos xnu ios qnx blackberry 10 blackberry tablet os windows windows xp tablet pc edition windows mobile windows phone 7 8 81 windows rt windows 10 mobile zircon fuchsia other blackberry os epoc geos magic cap nintendo dsi nintendo 3ds s30 s30 s40 nokia asha platform palmdos palm os psp ps vita symbian comparison of mobile operating systems list of mobile app distribution platforms open handset alliance open mobile alliance mobile app development vtepervasive gamesconcepts roleplaying persistence performing arts storytelling transmedia gamemaster mixed reality augmented reality ubiquitous computing context awareness crossmedia emergence virtual reality genres ubiquitous games mixed reality games mobile games alternate reality games live action roleplaying games affective gaming smart toys locationbased games exergames augmented reality tabletop games serious games treasure hunts flash mobs transreality gaming developers blast theory eric zimmerman jane mcgonigal niantic 