If you haven’t been living under a rock or on the Moon, you have most than likely started to notice the upward trend of mobile gaming. We are at a point where playing games is one of the three most important activities for mobile phone owners.
In turn, this has started to affect console and game sales.
Major developers of video games and manufactures of video game consoles are starting to feel the effect of this situation which only threatens to become bigger.
Let’s analyze the situation a bit thoroughly, shall we?
Advantages of Mobile Phone Gaming
It makes perfect sense for mobile phone games to develop so much as they have now. First of all, it does not take so much effort to develop and create a phone-based game and secondly it is far less cheap to do it.
Secondly, even though console games are becoming cheaper and cheaper, they still cost around $40 each. A mobile phone game usually costs a few bucks while there is a whole array of these that come free of charge. You don’t have to buy an expensive gaming system to play and added games for it, you just need a phone and an internet connection.
But the biggest advantage of mobile phone games is convenience. You can play it anywhere at any time. You just take out your phone and start playing. No elaborate contraptions are necessary to make the game work.
Advantages of Good Old Console Games
However, consoles do come with their own perks. More expensive games with more time invested in their development do look much more impressive than a game on your phone. Although handheld devices are slowly adding the same computing power as consoles have, they are still not quite there in terms of graphics.
Secondly, there is gameplay to consider. Some games do fare well while being played on a phone but not all of them can be compared with the experience of using a controller to do it. The experience of racing games is fairly unique so their gameplay can be equally fun on both systems. But shooters, beat-‘em-ups and even hack-and-slash games are much more elusive and interesting to play on a console with a traditional controller in hand.
The Future of Gaming
Many would immediately say that the future of gaming lies with mobile phone games. The development of bigger and better handheld devices certainly proves that mobile games will eventually take over completely and abolish consoles.
However, hardcore gamers still exist and they are not planning on quitting console games for mobile games. There is still a viable market for consoles and that is why developers are still producing excellent games and pumping them out each year.
The Verdict
It is hard to predict accurately where gaming goes from here. In my case, I would choose consoles anytime instead of phone games but that’s just me. We may get to see in a couple of years the direction where all of this is heading, but it’s still early now.