Gaming companies continually strive to find fresh audiences and avenues to showcase the skills of their developers.
Although the ultimate goal is to bring an idea to life or create a highly profitable brand, the main goal for gaming companies is to create a range of gaming titles that help them establish themselves as one of the top names in the sector.
The gaming world quickly leapt between innovations between the 1990s and the 2010s. Initially, home video gaming consoles provided a far more personalised and bespoke approach to gaming.
Fast-forward a decade, and the internet began to play an enormous role in how gaming companies approached new ideas, which is when mobile gaming first arose as a potential new market for the burgeoning gaming industry.
The rise of the smartphone and mobile casinos
Once smartphones became the latest groundbreaking piece of technology in the late 2000s, it wasn’t long before a host of gaming companies were looking to capitalize. Many mobile gaming innovations have appeared in tandem with the most impactful smartphone innovations.
For instance, as soon as mobile payment options started to become viable, mobile gaming companies provided avenues for gamers to utilize them in their gaming experience, ranging from microtransactions and purchasing in-game upgrades to paying by mobile services being leveraged by online casinos.
Within a decade, the number of people who owned smartphones quickly grew into the billions. With that, a gigantic market for mobile gaming emerged, and payment methods became an integral part of what made mobile gaming such an attractive proposition. The best pay by mobile casino sites operate like casinos that use traditional payment systems.
However, for casino gamers who use their mobiles to play, it has become a handy way to deposit their funds without entering card details or linking an e-wallet; they link the payment directly to their phone bill or as a payment taken from their service provider.
This approach has found an audience in the casino world and the broader mobile gaming community. Casino gaming and its payment innovations are a microcosm of the broader innovations that have shaped the current market.
A change in perception
Until top-selling mobile games started to rank alongside some of the most profitable console games, few people explored the idea that mobile gaming could rival the might of an Xbox or PlayStation. In fact, I’m old enough to remember when Snake took the mobile gaming world by storm in the 1990s, long before the smartphone and the internet started to transform the gaming industry.
Aside from their quirkiness and the fact that they were light to play on your phone, these games did not have the depth or engrossing nature of some of the landmark PlayStation, Nintendo 64 or Dreamcast games of the 1990s.
While there are some great Dreamcast emulators out there, the groundbreaking technology smartphones possessed in the late 2000s meant that people wanted fresh games they could play on their phones.
There was also a considerable leap forward in internet accessibility, and speed meant that gaming developers wanted to explore what it offered. It wasn’t long before a landmark title came along to get the world to sit up and take notice.
How the 2010s changed everything?
Among Us, Call of Duty: Mobile and PUBG Mobile boast a combined download of 1.2 billion. It’s an astonishing audience. All these games first emerged in the 2010s, but they utilised many newly available tools that made them global hits.
Activision has dominated the game console and mobile markets. It is the brains behind Call of Duty — in all its forms. Tencent, the brand behind PUBG, has a huge reach; it owns a range of other top games, including League of Legends, Assassin’s Creed and Clash of Clans.
Both these brands, but Tencent in particular, have leveraged the most significant changes in mobile gaming. They’ve been able to onboard some of the top professional video gamers and esports leagues to promote their brand.
Their social media management is among some of the most impressive anywhere in the world of gaming or entertainment, and they have put their weight behind some of the biggest esports tournaments in the world.
These individual factors are the most prominent ways that mobile gaming has changed over the years. The ability of companies like Tencent, who quickly realized that mobile gaming was a genuinely global market, has resulted in significant investment in these areas.
The mobile gaming market is becoming far more reliant on social media and affiliate marketing than traditional avenues, such as TV and newspaper adverts.
Conclusion
If we’re talking about how mobile gaming has changed through the years, it focuses on marketing and investment. It’s a part of the gaming world that traditionally has been undervalued and not seen as a worthwhile investment, discouraging designers from developing ideas that cater to this market.
However, as smartphones transformed this landscape and social media sites became integral in the growth of the gaming industry, mobile gaming companies fused these two components.
They created ideas that have defined their eras in gaming. Few people can deny that the 2010s were not the breakthrough era for mobile gaming. The fact that this was bolstered by multibillion-pound investment and exposure to an enormous global market meant that this area of gaming was able to reach its full potential.
It’ll be fascinating to watch how it evolves over the next decade, but as long as the investment keeps flowing and the audience remains invested in the sector’s growth, it will inevitably embrace the next wave of technological advances in the same manner.
