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A mobile game is a video game that is played on a mobile phone (feature phone or smartphone), tablet, smartwatch, PDA, portable media player or graphing calculator. The earliest known game on a mobile phone was a Tetris variant on the Hagenuk MT-2000 device from 1994. failed verification In 1997, Nokia launched the very successful Snake . Snake (and its variants), that was preinstalled in most mobile devices manufactured by Nokia, has since become one of the most played games and is found on more than 350 million devices worldwide. A variant of the Snake game for the Nokia 6110, using the infrared port, was also the first two-player game for mobile phones. Today, mobile 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. Downloadabl...

Towards the end of the 20th century, mobile phone ownership became ubiquitous in the industrialised world - due to the establishment of industry standards, and the rapid fall in cost of handset ownership, and use driven by economies of scale. As a result of this explosion, technological advancement by handset manufacturers became rapid. With these technological advances, mobile phone games also became increasingly sophisticated, taking advantage of exponential improvements in display, processing, storage, interfaces, network bandwidth and operating system functionality. The first such game that demonstrated the desire for handset games was a version of Snake that Nokia had included on its devices since 1997. The launch of Apple's iPhone in 2007 and the App Store in 2008 radically changed the market. The iPhone's focus on larger memory, multitasks, and additional sensing devices, including the touchscreen in later model, made it ideal for casual games, while the App Store made ...

Total global revenue from mobile games was estimated at $2.6 billion in 2005 by Informa Telecoms and Media . Total revenue in 2008 was $5.8 billion. The largest mobile gaming markets were in the Asia-Pacific nations Japan and China, followed by the United States. In 2012, the market had already reached $7.8 billion A new report was released in November 2015 showing that 1887 app developers would make more than one million dollars on the Google and iOS app stores in 2015. Mobile gaming revenue reached $50.4 billion in 2017, occupying 43% of the entire global gaming market and poised for further growth. It is expected to surpass the combined revenues from both PC gaming and console gaming in 2018.

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. Today, 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 devel...

With the introduction of the iOS App Store and support for in-app purchases by October 2009, the methods through which mobile games earn revenue have diverged significantly away from traditional game models on consoles or computers. Since 2009, a number of models have developed, and a mobile game developer/publisher may use one or a combination of these models to make revenue. Premium The premium model is akin to the traditional model where the user pays for the full game upfront. Additional downloadable content may be available which can be purchased separately. Initial games released to the App Store before in-app purchases were available used this approach, and still common for many types of games. Freemium The freemium or "free to try" model offers a small portion of the game for free, comparable to a game demo. After completing this, the player is given the option to make a one-time in-app purchase to unlock the rest of the game. Early games shortly after the introduct...

Mobile games tend to be small in scope (in relation to mainstream PC and console games) and many prioritise innovative design and ease of play over visual spectacle. Storage and memory limitations (sometimes dictated at the platform level) place constraints on file size that presently rule out the direct migration of many modern PC and console games to mobile. One major problem for developers and publishers of mobile games is describing a game in such detail that it gives the customer enough information to make a purchasing decision.

Games played on a mobile device using localization technology like GPS are called location-based games or location-based mobile games. These are not only played on mobile hardware but also integrate the player's position into the game concept. In other words, while it does not matter for a normal mobile game where exactly the player is (play them anywhere at any time), the player's coordinate and movement are the main elements in a location-based mobile game. A well known example is the treasure hunt game Geocaching , which can be played on any mobile device with integrated or external GPS receiver. External GPS receivers are usually connected via Bluetooth. clarification needed More and more mobile phones with integrated GPS are expected to come. citation needed Several other Location-based mobile games, such as BotFighters , are in the stage of research prototypes rather than being commercial successes.

Augmented reality games, while not limited to mobile devices, are also common on newer mobile platforms where the device includes a reverse-facing camera. While playing the game, the player aims the device's camera at a location and through the device's screen, sees the area captured by the camera plus computer-generated graphics atop it, augmenting the display and then allowing the player to interact that way. The graphics are generally drawn as to make the generated image appear to be part of the captured background, and will be rendered appropriate as the player moves the device around. The starting location may be a special marker that is picked up by the camera and recognized by the software to determine what to present, or may be based on the location through GPS. While other augmented reality examples exist, one of the most successful is Pokémon Go where the player, using the game app, travels to locations marked on their GPS map and then uses the augmented reality mode...

Since mobile devices have become present in the majority of households at least in the developed countries, there are more and more games created with educational or lifestyle- and health-improvement purposes. For example, mobile games can be used in speech-language pathology, children's rehabilitation in hospitals (Finnish startup Rehaboo!), acquiring new useful or healthy habits (Habitica app), memorising things and learning languages (Memrise). There are also apps with similar purposes which are not games per se, in this case they are called gamified apps. Sometimes it is difficult to draw a line between multipurpose games and gamified apps.

Many mobile games support multiple players, either remotely over a network or locally via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or similar technology. There are several options for playing multiplayer games on mobile phones: live synchronous tournaments and turn-based asynchronous tournaments. In live tournaments random players from around the world are matched together to compete. This is done using different networks such as Game Center, Google+, and Facebook. In asynchronous tournaments, there are two methods used by game developers centered around the idea that players matches are recorded and then broadcast at a later time to other players in the same tournament. Asynchronous gameplay resolves the issue of needing players to have a continuous live connection. This gameplay is different since players take individual turns in the game, therefore allowing players to continue playing against human opponents. This is done using different networks including OpenFeint (now defunct) and Facebook. Some compani...

Mobile games can be distributed in one of four ways: Over the Air (OTA) - a game binary file is delivered to the mobile device via wireless carrier networks. Sideloaded - a game binary file is loaded onto the phone while connected to a PC, either via USB cable or Bluetooth. Pre-installed - a game binary file is preloaded onto the device by the original equipment manufacturer (OEM). Mobile browser download - a game file is downloaded directly from a mobile website. Until the launch of Apple App Store, in the US, the majority of mobile games were sold by the US wireless carriers, such as AT&T Mobility, Verizon Wireless, Sprint Corporation and T-Mobile US. In Europe, games were distributed equally between carriers and off-deck, third-party stores. After the launch of Apple App Store, the mobile OS platforms like Apple iOS, Google Android, and Microsoft Windows Phone, the mobile OS developers themselves have launched digital download storefronts that can be run on the devices using ...