A mobile game is a video game played on a mobile device. The term may also refer to any game played on a portable device, such as a mobile phone, tablet, PDA, handheld game console, portable media player or graphing calculator, with or without network availability. The earliest mobile phone game was a Tetris variant released on the Hagenuk MT-2000 in 1994.
In 1997, Nokia launched Snake, which came pre-installed on Nokia devices for a number of years. Snake was recorded to be on 350 million devices worldwide. Through most of the 2000s, the majority of mobile games were powered by Java (J2ME).
As technology advanced, users became able to purchase and download games onto their devices. Initially limited to stores controlled by mobile network carriers, mobile gaming grew rapidly with the development of app stores in 2008: Apple's App Store was the first mobile content marketplace operated directly by a mobile-platform holder, significantly altering consumer behavior by increasing access to downloadable mobile apps and granting more leverage and opportunity to independent developers.
Mobile gaming is the largest and most lucrative sector of the video game industry today, accounting for 49% of total global gaming revenue in 2025.
History
Toward the end of the 20th century, mobile phone ownership became increasingly widespread worldwide, driven by the establishment of industry standards, the rapid decline in handset costs, and growing consumer demandeconomies 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 complex due to improvements in display, processing, storage, interfaces, network bandwidth, and operating system functionality. The first game that indicated a demand for handset games was a version of Snake that Nokia had included on its devices since 1997.
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. In 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.
By the mid-2000s, there was a large market for mobile games, of which many were built on the Java ME platform that many devices at the time supported. Earlier, they could be obtained using SMS short codes before manufacturers and mobile network operators started offering them for download both on the Web (on a PC to be transferred to the device) and directly via the air (using GPRS, 3G, or Wi-Fi).
The launch of Apple's iPhone in 2007 and the App Store in 2008 altered the market. The iPhone's focus on larger memory, multitasks, and additional sensing devices, including the touchscreen in later models, made it suited for casual games, while the App Store, which is also independent from mobile carriers, made it easy for developers to create and publish apps, and for users to search for and obtain new games. Further, the App Store added the ability to support in-app purchases in October 2009. This allowed games like Angry Birds and Cut the Rope to find new monetization models away from the traditional premium "pay once" model. The market stabilized around iPhone devices and Google's Android-based phones which offered a similar app store through Google Play.
A further major shift came with 2012's Candy Crush Saga and Puzzle & Dragons, games that used a stamina-like gameplay feature found in social-network games like FarmVille to limit the number of times one could play it in a single period, but allowed optional in-app purchases to restore that stamina immediately and continue playing. This new monetization brought in millions of players to both games and millions of dollars in revenue, establishing the "freemium" model that would be a common, but controversial approach for many mobile games going forward.
Mobile gaming grew rapidly over the next several years, buoyed by rapid expansion in China. By 2016, top mobile games were earning over a year, and the total revenue for the mobile games sector had surpassed that of other video game areas.
Other major trends in mobile games include hyper-casual games such as Flappy Bird or Crossy Road, and location-based games like Pokémon Go.
Mobile gaming has impacted the larger video game market by drawing demand away from handheld video game consoles; both Nintendo and Sony had seen major drops in sales of their eighth generation handhelds compared to their seventh generation predecessors as a result of mobile gaming. At the same time, mobile gaming introduced the concept of microconsoles, low-cost, low-powered home video game consoles that used mobile operating systems to take advantage of the wide variety of games available on these platforms.
Calculator games
Calculator gaming is a form of gaming in which games are played on programmable calculators, especially graphing calculators.
In 1980, Casio's MG-880 pocket calculator had a built-in "Invaders" game (essentially a downscaled Space Invaders clone), released in the summer that year. Another early example is the type-in program Darth Vader's Force Battle for the TI-59, published in BYTE in October 1980. The magazine also published a version of Hunt the Wumpus for the HP-41C.
Few other games exist for the earliest of programmable calculators (including the Hewlett-Packard 9100A, one of the first scientific calculators), such as the long-popular Lunar Lander game often used as an early programming exercise. However, limited program address space and a lack of easy program storage made calculator gaming a rarity even as programmables became cheap and relatively easy to obtain. It was not until the early 1990s that 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 HP-48 and TI-82 could be programmed in proprietary programming languages such as RPL programming language or TI-BASIC 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 HP-48 was released in 1993; Doom for HP-48 was created in 1995). Some games such as Dope Wars caused controversy when students played them in school.
The look and feel of these games on an HP-48 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 8-bit handheld consoles such as the early Game Boy or the Gameking (low resolution, monochrome or grayscale graphics), or to the built-in games of non-Java 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 TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus series, among TI's first graphing calculators to natively support assembly. TI-BASIC programming also rose in popularity after the release of third-party libraries. Assembly remained the language of choice for these calculators, which run on a Zilog Z80 processor, although some assembly implementations have been created to ease the difficulty of learning assembly language. For those running on a Motorola 68000 processor (like the TI-89), C programming (possibly using TIGCC) had begun to replace assembly.
Because they can be programmed without outside tools, calculator games have survived despite the proliferation of mobile devices such as mobile phones and PDAs.
Different platforms
Mobile games have been developed to run on a wide variety of platforms and technologies including the (today largely defunct) Palm OS, Symbian, Adobe Flash Lite, NTT DoCoMo's DoJa, Sun's Java, Qualcomm's BREW, WIPI, BlackBerry, Nook and early incarnations of Windows Mobile.
Today, the most widely supported platforms are Apple's iOS and Google's Android. The mobile version of Microsoft's Windows 10 (formerly Windows Phone) is also actively supported, although it holds a lower market share relative to iOS and Android.
Java was at one time the most common platform for mobile games; 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 provides a number of proprietary technologies (such as Metal) made for mobile developers.
Monetization
With the introduction of the iOS App Store and support for in-app purchases by October 2009, the methods through which mobile games earn revenue have diverged significantly from traditional game models on consoles or computers. Since 2009, a number of models have been developed, and a mobile game developer/publisher may use one or a combination of these models to make revenue.
Premium The premium model is akin to the traditional model where the user pays for the full game upfront. Additional downloadable content may be available which can be purchased separately. Initial games released to the App Store before in-app purchases were available used this approach, and it is still common for many types of games.
Freemium The freemium or "free to try" model offers a small portion of the game for free, comparable to a game demo. After completing this, the player is given the option to make a one-time in-app purchase to unlock the rest of the game. Early games shortly after the introduction of the in-app purchase feature used this approach such as Cut the Rope and Fruit Ninja.
Free-to-play A free-to-play game requires no cost at all to play, and generally is designed to be playable from start to finish without having to spend any money in the game. However, the game will include gameplay mechanics that may slow progress towards completing the game. Commonly, this is some form of energy or stamina that limits how many turns or actions a player can take each day. By using in-app purchases, the player can immediately restore their energy or stamina and continue. In-app purchases can also be used to buy power-ups and other items to give the player a limited-time advantage to help complete the game. While free-to-play games had been common on computers before mobile, the method was popularized in mobile gaming with Candy Crush Saga and Puzzle & Dragons.
Advertising-supported An ad-supported game is free to download and play, but periodically interrupts gameplay with advertisements. The developer earns revenue from the advertising network. In some cases, an in-app purchase allows the player to fully disable ads in these games.
Subscription model