Back in gaming’s stone age (read: the 1970s), the first electronic handheld gaming devices were heralded as miracles of portable play. Think Mattel Football with its lines of LED lights and blarp-bloop sound effects or Simon, that candy-colored hunk of bleating plastic. The following decade brought the wonders of handheld games that used cartridges to let users play different titles. That technology continued to advance through the 1990s and 2000s, with improved graphics and faster gameplay. That’s also when early cellphones started getting their own games—and a few people even played them, despite the small screens, fiddly controls and lackluster graphics.
Then came a watershed moment for mobile gaming. In the mid-2000s, smartphones stormed onto the scene and eventually let people take higher-fidelity games wherever they went. What’s more, the systems allowed users to download new games at the touch of a button for just a dollar or two, whereas previous handheld gaming consoles used cartridges that cost upwards of $40 a piece. The result? Birds got angry. Candy was crushed. And a gaming subset that once had been dismissed with a chuckle by serious gamers found remarkable success.
How remarkable? Newzoo’s 2021 global games market report estimated that the mobile category accounted for 52% of overall gaming revenue in 2021, more than PC and console games combined. But while what has happened to mobile gaming over the past 15 years might seem surprising, several seismic shifts are promising to reconfigure mobile gaming even more profoundly than the smartphone revolution.
A key driver of these changes? Supercharged performance, thanks to a combination of the high speeds and low latency that 5G networks can offer, and mobile-edge computing (MEC), which moves data processing to the edge of the network—and closer to users—to reduce response times and potentially providing access to far more processing power than what’s native to the user’s device. The combination could change the way gamers think of mobile vs. console gaming by fundamentally changing the kind of experiences anyone thought possible on mobile.
With that in mind, here are five advances that mobile gamers can look forward to.
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