Mobile Video Games refer to all games that are played on any portable device, including from mobile phone (feature phone or smartphone), tablet, PDA to handheld game console, portable media player or graphing calculator, with and without network availability.

One can play video games from anywhere these days; a home console, gaming PC, streamed over the internet, or on your smartphone or tablet. For many, loading up new devices with games is priority No. 1 in order to pass the time during a morning commute, at a doctor’s office, or on the couch. Sometimes, however, a silly little phone game turns into hours of non-stop gameplay.

Mobile video gaming is driving the rapid growth of the global video gaming market. In 2020, smartphone games accounted for almost 50 percent of video gaming revenue worldwide, and as mobile penetration rates and smartphone usage continue to surge, mobile games revenue is set to surpass $100 billion by 2023.

Unsurprisingly, this mobile revolution is also significantly transforming the gaming landscape in the United States, one of the largest video game markets worldwide.

In 2020, mobile games revenue in the U.S. reached a record 10.73 billion U.S. dollars, and thanks to a wave of technological advances, digital innovation, and nationwide lockdowns amidst the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the number of U.S. mobile video game users is now higher than ever.

Mobile video games are usually downloaded from an app store as well as from mobile operator’s portals, but in some cases are also preloaded in the handheld devices by the OEM or by the mobile operator when purchased, via infrared connection, Bluetooth, or memory card, or side loaded onto the handset with a cable.

According to Wikipedia, downloadable mobile games were first commercialised in Japan circa the launch of NTT DoCoMo’s I-mode platform in 1999, and by the early 2000s were available through a variety of platforms throughout Asia, Europe, North America and ultimately most territories where modern carrier networks and handsets were available by the mid-2000s.

Mobile gaming has impacted the larger video game market by drawing demand away from handheld video game consoles. At the same time, mobile gaming introduced the concept of micro-consoles, 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.

Mobile games have been developed to run on a wide variety of platforms and technologies. These include 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.

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 in terms of market share remains marginal compared to iOS and Android.

Java was at one time the most common platform for mobile games, however 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 provide a number of proprietary technologies (such as Metal) intended to allow developers to make more effective use of their hardware in iOS-native games.