Ninth generation consoles have now well and truly settled into the gaming landscape but many of us prefer to take our gaming habits on the go. Could our smartphones be the devices that ultimately take the throne as gaming royalty?
As technology has evolved, the number of people that play video games and consider themselves gamers has skyrocketed. This is thanks, in part, to a surge in popularity of a new kind of game—the casual game. Games that take little to no tutorial, that are immediately apparent how to play and win, and have a much shorter length of each gaming session.
Casino games, coincidentally, fall neatly into this category especially the fruit machine variety. And playing online slots on the go has been made accessible to everyone with a smartphone—a number thought to be almost 80% of the global population. Now all casino players need is a mobile phone and internet connection and they can access a wide range of themed slot games as well as other casino gaming apps.
What choice is there for mobile gaming?
Smartphones are the most obvious candidates. Smartphone penetration across the world has made it an obvious choice for app developers not wanting to miss out on such a huge market. Games like Angry Birds, Temple Run and Fruit Ninja set the standard and paved the way for more sophisticated, modern titles.
There are now several proprietary accessories available that can make the smartphone gaming experience more immersive. Control pads that are designed to seamlessly integrate with phones make player input more accurate and effortless, and VR headsets have the power to transport the gamer into a digital world.
The popularity of gaming on the go has not gone unnoticed by console manufacturers, many of which have tried to make their mark in the mobile market. Not least, the Nintendo Switch which is itself a tablet. The Switch is a hybrid device that can be docked and used as a home console or taken on the move and used as a portable device.
The history of handheld gaming
The Nintendo Gameboy holds a special cult-like status in the mobile gaming world. The Sega Game Gear, released a year later, was a more powerful device with a colour screen and more impressive graphics but ate through batteries and was hence very expensive to run. Battery technology has come a long way since then and has made it feasible to produce more powerful handheld devices.
Nintendo had another hit with the DS and 3DS and Sony also played their hand with the PSP and later the Vita but it became difficult to sell a dedicated handheld gaming device when a smartphone, which people already owned, could do so much more.
Mobile vs console gaming
The advantages of mobile gaming are clear and eponymous. Gamers can enjoy playing anywhere they like so long as their battery holds up and they have signal available (if the game requires an internet connection). The proliferation of unlimited data plans makes the concept of data dependent games more feasible.
Consoles and indeed gaming PCs have the advantage of much more powerful hardware. The titles consoles can support can be more cinematic, complex and arguably more engrossing.
Ninth gen Sony PS5 and Microsoft Xbox Series X consoles boast 16GB of RAM and in excess of 10TFLOPS of GPU power, whereas the most powerful iPhone models have only 6GB of RAM and 5TFLOPS graphics processing. This is due to the fact that consoles have mains power and are not as limited by size constraints.
What are the most popular mobile games?
The range of mobile games available is now pretty broad. Mobile ports of console games like Call of Duty are popular and frequently feature in top download lists alongside free-to-play endless strategy games with microtransactions at their core—games like Clash of Clans and Hay Day, developed by Finnish company Supercell.
The chart-topping battle royale title Fortnite is available for android only (after an ongoing dispute with Apple’s App Store) and amassed six million downloads in one month alone. The mobile version of Player Unknown’s BattleGround in the same genre has to date accumulated over 1 billion total downloads with daily active users in the tens of millions.
The success of Pokémon Go in 2016 took the world by storm—an augmented reality game where players seek out and capture Pokémon in real world locations. Pokémon Go is an example of a video game that could only be realised using mobile technology, interacting with the world through your screen.
Cloud gaming
Cloud gaming services could help to diminish the biggest limitation of handheld devices—their processor capabilities. Even as technology improves and continues to reduce in size, consoles will always have the advantage of fewer restrictions of proportion.
When players use a cloud gaming service, a large percentage of the processing power required to run a game takes place on external servers. These server computers can be significantly more powerful than consoles and require only a fast internet connection to be communicated with and made use of. Cloud services are already beginning to make their mark in the industry and their pricing model can be compared to TV streaming services like Netflix and Disney Plus.
For the time being there seems to be enough space for both consoles and mobile gaming devices to coexist peacefully, each with their own specializations. But one thing is for sure, gaming on the go is a trend that is set to continue with more of us demanding convenience and accessibility over everything else.