2016 has been a pretty big year for mobile gaming. A lot of incredibly cool stuff happened, a lot of other not so cool stuff happened as well, but we don’t like to dwell too much on the negative here at App Spy. It’s not our USP.
So here’s a look back at a few of the biggest developments that happened over the last twelve months, and what they might mean for the industry moving forwards.
As ever, if you’ve got your own thoughts to add to the discussion, feel free to toss them merrily and with a flagrant disregard for punctuation into the comments section right down there at the bottom of the article.
Nintendo went mobile
It might only have happened properly in the last few weeks, but the big N finally making the big leap onto the smallest screens is more than worthy of nabbing top spot on our list of sutff what happened.
And the nice thing is that Super Mario Run is actually really, really good. One might even go so far as to say that it’s critically acclaimed. It’s a Nintendo game on your phone as well, and that’s just really exciting.
It’s one of those rare occurrences of something being worth the wait. If you’ve not had a chance to play it yet, then you really should wander over to the App Store right now and get playing.
Pokemon went mobile
Yeah, Nintendo has taken the two top spots on the list. Albeit a little tangentially. Pokemon Go is really a Niantic production. Which sort of means it’s a Google production. Google and Nintendo, sitting in a tree.
This was one of those games that captured the zeitgeist, that stuck in the imagination of players and none-players alike. Seriously, just look at the amount of content created around the phenomenon. And it’s still going strong.
It also showed the world exactly what mobile can do. This is a game that you just couldn’t play on anything else. It’s smart, it gets you out and about, and in a wonderful way it brings people together.
The Switch
Er, okay, this is becoming a very Nintendo dominated list. But that’s not really a surprise, since Nintendo has been doing lots of interesting stuff this year. Not least announcing its new console.
Except it’s not really a console. Except that it is. Except that it isn’t. It’s a mixture of a handheld, a console, and a bunch of other stuff as well. And it looks like it could be an interesting step in the right direction for the industry.
Whether or not it all comes off remains to be seen, but the idea of being able to take your gaming on the go and then plug it right back in when you get home. It’s the sort of thing I’ve been banging on about for ages.
Mobile tops Google’s searches
The big search terms this year were announced recently by Google, and it makes for some pretty interesting reading if you’re the sort of person who gets interested to read about what the top search terms of the year were.
The hottest tech topics on the search giant were the iPhone 7, as well as a variety of other iPhones. The Switch made it onto the list too, despite only being announced towards the end of the year.
Pokemon GO was the most searched for term for the whole year. And in the US, it was Slither.io and Agar.io that dominated the list of the most searched for games, beating the likes of Overwatch and Call of Duty.
