Mobile Phone Gaming: The New Niche for Smartphones

Ever since mobile phones started to have screens of their own, there were games that were incorporated in the handsets. While at first there was the simple game called Snake, a proprietary of Nokia, mobile users these days can enjoy a level of mobile gaming experience that was once the prerogative of only home computers and gaming consoles.

Yet, mobile gaming can be termed as a relatively recent development and was slow to pick up compared to other mobile phone technologies. The minuscule screens of the earlier cell phone handsets coupled with their limitation to only alphanumeric controls means that mobile phone gaming, for long, was more of a gimmick than anything else.

But all that almost changed overnight with the arrival of touch-screen smartphones in 2007. These smartphones had bigger screens that were more in sync with graphical games. Moreover, the method of input was much more appropriate than a small constricted physical keypad. Introduction of application stores like the Android Market and Apple App Store provided a means for small game developers to introduce their gaming software to the cell phone market.

It can be said without doubt that there has been a huge surge in the popularity of gaming smartphones in the last one year, so much so that the level of gaming can be compared to traditional game consoles. Microsoft and Sony are the two rivals that are competing with each other to acquire the larger pie of the smartphone gaming sector.

The Windows Mobile operating system has been steadily losing ground to Android and Apple and this led the Redmond-based company to redesign its strategy. Seeing the increase in popularity of cheap smartphones, the two companies pulled up their socks and got going on a fresh set of games compatible for cheap smartphones.

Most games developers, and that includes the more famous ones, were initially apprehensive of whether cheap smartphones would be popular or not and were thus hesitant to design games for such phones. Most of the games designed were for high-end smartphone handsets and targeted at the business customer.

However, the popularity of cheap smartphones from several major cell phone manufacturers changed the scenario. In fact, these manufacturers themselves weren’t sure about the success of cheap handsets. But once these cheap inexpensive handsets caught the fancy of the customer, game developers sensed the huge gaming market waiting to be explored and started developing games for cheap smartphones.

Other relatively unknown companies and small developers soon joined the bandwagon and the cheap smartphone manufacturers started incorporating these games in their handsets. The games had full graphics and sound. The range included action, adventure, sports and mind-games.

As the world of cheap smartphones expand with every passing day, more and more game developers are coming up with better games to woo the customer. The market for smartphone gaming is still at the developmental stage and we can fairly expect to see more interesting and graphically arresting games to be introduced in the near feature. It’ll be the cheap smartphone buyer who’ll eventually emerge as the winner.