The popularisation of mobile games began as early as 1997 with the introduction of Snake preloaded on Nokia feature phones, demonstrating the practicality of games on these devices. Several mobile device manufacturers included preloaded games in the wake of Snake's success. In 1999, the introduction of the i-mode service in Japan allowed a wide variety of more advanced mobile games to be downloaded onto smartphones, though the service was largely limited to Japan. By the early 2000s, the technical specifications of Western handsets had also matured to the point where downloadable applications (including games) could be supported, but mainstream adoption continued to be hampered by market fragmentation between different devices, operating environments, and distributors.
The introduction of the iPhone and its dedicated App Store provided a standard means for developers of any size to develop and publish games for the popular smartphone. Several early success stories from app developers in the wake of the App Store's launch in 2008 attracted a large number of developers to speculate on the platform. Most initial games were published as premium (pay-once) titles, but the addition of in-app purchases in October 2009 allowed games to try other models, with notable successes Angry Birds and Cut the Rope using a combination of free-to-try and ad-supported games. Apple's success with the App Store drastically altered the mobile landscape and within a few years left only its and Google's Android-based smartphones using its Google Play app store as the dominant players.
A major transition in game monetization came with the introduction of Candy Crush Saga and Puzzle & Dragons, taking gameplay concepts from social-network games which generally required the player to wait some length of time after exhausting a number of turns for a day, and offering the use of in-app purchases to refresh their energy. These games generated revenue numbers previously unseen in the mobile game sector, and became the standard for many freemium games that followed. Many of the most successful games have hundreds of millions of players, and have annual revenues exceeding a year, with the top games breaking .
More recent trends have included hyper-casual games such as Crossy Road and location-based games like Pokémon Go.
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. Nintendo's Gunpei Yokoi had conceived of their Game & Watch line - handheld games that also served as a digital timepiece - after seeing a bored businessman on a commuter train pass time by using a calculator to play makeshift games.
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 games 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 6110 mobile phone which included 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 phone it released since, with about 400 million devices shipped with the game installed as of 2016.
In 1999, NTT Docomo launched the i-mode mobile platform in Japan, allowing mobile games to be downloaded onto smartphones. Several Japanese video game developers announced games for the i-mode platform that year, such as Konami announcing its dating simulation Tokimeki Memorial. The same year, Nintendo and Bandai were developing mobile phone adapters for their handheld game consoles, the Game Boy Color and WonderSwan, respectively. By 2001, i-mode had users in Japan, along with more advanced handsets with graphics comparable to 8-bit consoles. A wide variety of games were available for the i-mode service, along with announcements from established video game developers such as Taito, Konami, Namco, and Hudson Soft, including ports of classic arcade games and 8-bit console games.
Snake showed there was a viable interest in expanding the capabilities of mobile phones for gaming applications. With the introduction of the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), many mobile phones were able to access limited browser-based games, and later downloading new apps that could be purchased from their wireless carrier or a third party distributor to use on their phone. However, at this stage, in the early 2000s, 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 focused their efforts on specific software platforms and subsets of available devices. Additionally, a range of software platform standards, like J2ME, Macromedia Flash Lite, DoJa, and Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless (BREW), existed, the implementations of which varied by phone manufacturer 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. Mobile game discoverability was further complicated by the limitations of the early mobile internet. Games were often primarily offered via a content store provided by a wireless carrier (the "carrier deck"). Publishers would license games for inclusion on these portals. These stores tended to be largely text-based, offering very limited descriptions of products or sophisticated search and navigation. As a result, games promoted by carriers (thereby appearing nearer the top of the store) tended to be greatly more successful, while others listed below would not be seen by many users who did not scroll beyond the first page of the deck.
Prior to 2007, Japan was the leading developer for games on handsets since most of the primary handset developers were located there and smartphones had a greater proliferation among the population. A wide array of various genres were tried, including virtual pet games which used early camera phone features as part of the gameplay cycle.
Meanwhile, handheld consoles still typically 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 phone. 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 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 also included a capacitive touchscreen that did not require any stylus and could be controlled by a finger, with later models adding support for multipoint sensing. In 2008, alongside the iPhone 3G, Apple released an iPhone OS software development kit, allowing developers to officially and inexpensively develop native apps (whereas previously, only web apps were allowed and native apps could only be installed through jailbreaking), which could be published through the newly available App Store.
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. These figured doubled three months later (circa March 2009), and by November 2009, the App Store had over 100,000 apps with over 2 billion downloads.
Gaming applications were one major area that found success on the App Store. 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 , and within two months of launch, had made 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. PopCap Games, which had already had success with a line of computer and browser-based puzzle games such as Bejeweled, was one of the first companies to transition their products to mobile versions in 2009 which helped them to rapidly grow their mobile business, leading to their acquisition by Electronic Arts in 2011 as to allow Electronic Arts to compete in the mobile and casual games area.
Beyond games, the iPhone and App Store caused most other smartphone manufacturers to abandon their own attempts to build out a more sophisticated smartphone environment, such as BlackBerry and Symbian. BlackBerry had attempted to release its own app store but failed to gain the success as Apple's. 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 had 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) At launch, 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.