What Will the Face of Mobile Gaming Be Like in the Future?

• Posted by Crawforddefine Crawforddefine August 5, 2021 - Filed in Other - #Monochrome LCD  - 916 views

  Over the course of its more than four-decade existence, gaming has advanced significantly. In order to accommodate the limits of the available hardware at the time, early commercial video games such as Pong and Space Invaders featured rudimentary graphics and physics.

  

  All of these games were played on massive arcade machines such as the Taito 8080, which needed players to insert a coin in order to be granted a short period of time to engage in gameplay. It would be a few years later before these games began to make their way into people's homes, thanks to the development of small-footprint hardware that could be placed on a desk or next to a television.

  Because of the rapid development of portable gaming devices,
  Despite early attempts to make gaming portable, such as the Nintendo Game & Watch and the Coleco Electronic Quarterback, these devices were severely constrained, with only a single game available on each device and LEDs and monochrome LCD panels.

  The holy grail of portable gaming would be a machine that could be carried around and that allowed you to enter media in order to play new titles when you wanted to play them. While using a black and white dot-matrix screen and only being capable of running games that were a few kilobytes in size, Nintendo achieved this feat in 1989 with the Game Boy handheld game console.

  

  The mobile gaming sector is expanding at a rapid pace.
  During the course of a decade, mobile gaming has progressed from simple, turn-based titles to fully-fledged titles that are on par with the intricacy and quality of games found on consoles and desktops. App downloads for mobile games have continued to expand at an astounding rate, with the most recent numbers for 2020 showing that downloads increased by 18 percent over the previous year.

  Despite the fact that mobile gaming has progressed significantly from the portable gaming devices of the past, there are still many advances to look forward to in the near future.

  Cross-Platform Interaction
  For many years, players have wished for the ability to play games across many platforms. It enables PC players to compete against opponents using consoles, tablets, and smartphones, and it allows friends to finally game together, regardless of which platform they are each using. Over the last few years, games like as Fortnite have implemented this feature for their free-to-play battle royale mode, bringing the notion closer to reality.

  Graphics that are pleasant to the eye are increasingly standard on mobile devices.
  Since the introduction of the first smartphones in the late 2000s, the graphics capabilities of smartphones have advanced significantly. The graphics processing units (GPUs) have been upgraded in tandem with the CPUs, resulting in additional power for smartphones to generate better and more detailed images. As well, smartphone screens have been changed on a regular basis to ensure that the enhanced graphics may be experienced fully.

  With the recent announcement that Samsung is developing a new, higher-capacity System on a Chip (SoC) for the Scandinavian and European versions of its upcoming Galaxy S22 range, which will include an AMD GPU, it is clear that smartphone gaming graphics will continue to improve for the foreseeable future.

  It remains to be seen whether new technologies will be able to reduce the gap between mobile gaming graphics and those available on the most recent generation of consoles in the future. The Xbox One X and PlayStation 5 both include graphics processors that are among the most powerful on the market, boasting around 16 GB of GDDR6 RAM, 2304 cores, and more than 600 GFLOPS, respectively.

  There is currently no way to get that level of performance onto a pocket-sized device, though recent advances such as Apple's M1 SoC indicate that we may be moving in that direction.

  

  Streaming
  Another option for narrowing the gap between mobile and PC/console gaming is to outsource all of the heavy work, removing it from the smartphone and have it executed on a powerful server in the cloud, as described above.

  While this may sound like science fiction, it is actually the how streaming services such as Google Stadia operate in real life. This service, which began in 2020, makes it possible to play AAA games that would otherwise be available only on consoles and computers, such as FIFA 21, F1 2020, Doom, Hitman, and Red Dead Redemption 2.

  Although not all Android smartphones are currently capable of taking advantage of Stadia, the vast majority of newer models are compatible with the platform.

  Gaming isn't restricted to the confines of a smartphone, either. Players may play on their TV or PC, pause the game, and then continue up where they left off on their smartphone with Stadia, a hybrid solution from Google.

  Summarizing, mobile gaming has witnessed significant progress throughout the course of its history, particularly in terms of bridging the gap between it and traditional console and computer gaming. With more powerful hardware enabling better graphics to be delivered and streaming services enabling us to play our favorite games on demand, whenever we want them, the future is likely to be more of the same.