Since time began human beings have enjoyed playing games, we have always tried to find entertainment not only in groups but also personal enjoyment, and the mobile games genre is technologies answer to mankind’s desperate need for “mobile” gaming which is easily accessible and offers new levels of entertainment, competition, and learning.

To truly understand the reason why games and in particular gaming are so popular we have to first look at the numerous definitions of a game:
1. an amusement or pastime: children’s games.

2. the material or equipment used in playing certain games: a store selling toys and games.

3. a competitive activity involving skill, chance, or endurance on the part of two or more persons who play according to a set of rules, usually for their own amusement or for that of spectators.

4. a single occasion of such an activity, or a definite portion of one: the final game of the season; a rubber of three games at bridge.

5. the number of points required to win a game.

6. the score at a particular stage in a game: With five minutes to play, the game was 7 to 0.

7. a particular manner or style of playing a game: Her game of chess is improving.

8. anything resembling a game, as in requiring skill, endurance, or adherence to rules: the game of diplomacy.”

From Dictionary.com

Technology has advanced in recent years for numerous reasons, but the main reason for our desire to keep increasing standards is to increase efficiency in doing standard tasks which would not be as easy without a computer. For example the main reason the first computer was built was to carry out complex calculations, something which we now take for granted regularly. Perhaps this clear sense of a computer being for “work” actually led to the development of the first computer based games. There was a need for relief from the monotony of endless calculations and developers soon began to see a gap in the market for games which could be entertaining but also challenging for the brain (Solitaire anyone?).

The computer gaming industry came before the mobile gaming industry largely due to the fact that computers held a lot more processing power and were easier to develop games for. It is for this reason that the computer gaming industry is still ahead of mobile gaming. In 2007 there was approximately $20 billion of turnover in the computer gaming market, while only $0.8 billion of that came from Mobile gaming.

Perhaps the first recognized Mobile game is Nokia’s “Snake” game which was released in 1995, it soon became an international phenomenon with hours of people’s time spent trying to better their high score. Manufacturers soon saw that having games on a phone was a necessity and actually vastly increased the desirability of having a mobile phone to the younger generations. If, for example, Snake had not been released as early as it was, it is likely the mobile phone industry would still be struggling to find it’s connection with teenagers and young people.

Circa 1999, the Japanese success of “I-Mode” based games soon created a large demand for games running on WAP (games that could be played using the mobile phone’s WAP browser facility). Nokia’s 7100 model was perhaps the very first phone to introduce this capability. The main problem with this particular method of gaming was the connection speed, which was often very poor and in many places non-existent. By 2001 the market had evolved again with the beginning of full colour screens and even downloadable game on mobile handsets. This brought mobile gaming into the 21st century and demand increased rapidly. The ability to play games in colour and also to download them on the move (with increased WAP compatibility) made mobile gaming an extremely entertaining and accessible activity. The recent movement towards mobile phones which are effectively “mini-computers” has also served to increase the popularity of gaming, since the quality gap between mobile games and computer games has decreased significantly since the early days of snake.

Nokia continues to lead in the terms of gaming ability in their mobile phones; they have continually innovated to ensure that their phones have the best graphics more power than anything else on the market. This eventually led to their release of the N-Gage, an incredibly popular phone which was effectively a complete gaming console to rival some of the purely gaming handheld devices. There are problems afoot for Nokia however. As China becomes a more and more important economic presence their mobile phone market will continue to flourish and will eventually come abroad at which point Nokia will have some of the best innovators in the world to compete against. As the Chinese companies increase their market share the mobile phone business is expected to grow to epic proportions.

The price of a mobile phone game has remained pretty constant in recent years, since the only changes have been in quality since mobile phone users have begun to demand increases in quality as mobile phones become more and more powerful. Most games cost approximately £5/$10 and this price, while considered by consumers to be quite high, is relatively cheap compared to other games on different consoles. Consumers argue that the quality of game is much lower and so the price should reflect this, but in reality the quality of mobile games has increased hugely in recent years and the gap in quality is expected to close greatly in the next few years.

The mobile game business, while relatively young compared to the PC gaming business, is growing rapidly and is becoming a more and more important factor when considering the purchase of a phone. It has become a necessity for producers to consider the gaming aspect of their phones before they output them to the consumer, otherwise consumers will look elsewhere believing that if a phone isn’t good enough to have quality games on it, it probably isn’t as powerful as desired.