As an industry dependent on constantly evolving technology, gaming is, by its very nature, progressive. Some of these developments are difficult to predict, while others simply reflect the nature of improving processing capabilities. In the modern age, there are indications that mobile gaming could stand as the industry’s next focus.
While this might seem impossible for long-time and hardcore gamers, it’s not as unlikely as you might think.
Laying the Groundwork
Just as with consoles, PCs, and handheld gaming machines, mobiles have made great strides to arrive at where they stand today. Technologically, these are powerful than the dedicated gaming devices which many of us grew up with. With each year they gain more processing power, higher memory capacities, and more refined methods of gameplay.
This is the case for older style games at least, but many of the biggest success stories have come from games which operate online. Games like Clash of Clans, for example, have proven a perfect fit for smartphones, bringing in millions of players and becoming near household names.
Developments like these didn’t just happen overnight, as other components of gaming aided this platform’s growth. Online casino games like poker at Redbet are some of the most significant contributors on this front. Rather than reinvent the wheel, these services offer classic poker and other card games which translate perfectly to mobile devices. In turn, this built the mobile gaming community and showed the video gaming industry what could be accomplished.
Going Forward
With the developments of power and connectivity came a greater focus. It is the focus which has opened the path to the next generation in mobile gaming, where recent developments have raised the bar of possibilities to entirely new and unprecedented levels.
The most visible of these is the rapidly approaching streaming technology as offered by Google’s Stadia. In effect, this service acts similar to video streaming services such as Netflix and YouTube, only the experience is magnitudes more interactive.
While this is not a new idea, this technology required immense bandwidth and low-latency connections in order to become viable. With 5G now becoming a reality, and options like fibre-optic entering the mainstream, we have finally entered an era where this potential can be unlocked.
What sets this apart from traditional and other modern mobile gaming methods is through how these games are delivered. Traditionally, games have had to rely on the host devices to perform the calculations of running the game. This is why mobiles and handhelds tended to have lower fidelity than their console and desktop counterparts – they have less processing overhead available.
Streaming services, however, offload these calculations to the server and effectively stream the user the final product. This means that any game, no matter how demanding, could be streamed at maximum settings to any device with sufficient internet connectivity. It might not be the right fit for genres like first-person shooters, but the end result is almost any game available from a modern mobile device.
That is not to say that this will be the natural conclusion of mobile gaming. The high connectivity requirements will mean that there will always be a call for the more traditional. As the technology becomes increasingly viable, however, expect mobiles to become an increasingly popular choice for all games, not just those developed explicitly for a mobile device.