A Revolution Is Coming to Mobile Gaming. Apple and Google, Look Out

The mobile gaming industry is huge, currently valued at almost $200 billion and growing. There are now 3 billion mobile gamers around the world. If they were a country, they’d be the world’s largest by far.

But for all the dynamism of the developers, the size of the market, the creativity of the games and, of course, the engagement of gamers themselves, there’s one element of the industry that has become stale and stuck. I’m talking about the way we access games in the first place.

The mobile gaming market is at the mercy of an Apple-Google duopoly. These two behemoths exert almost total control over the apps—including mobile games—that are available for download by the public. Apple’s App Store, in particular, charges onerous fees to developers while wielding total, arbitrary power over which games can be downloaded. Developers have little recourse if Tim Cook decides to remove their product.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Smartphones revolutionized gaming—and everything else—15 years ago. Now, new technologies once again stand to disrupt the way mobile games are developed, distributed and played.

Beyond the Walled Garden

Since the advent of smartphones more than 15 years ago, apps have been fenced off in proprietary “walled gardens.” This is a paradigm where a single company controls a proprietary ecosystem for third-party products, determining who can sell to their users and under what circumstances. This framework also forces people to use the products of the walled garden’s owner—in this case, Apple or Google.

But there is another way.

The key to solving this problem starts with Progressive Web Apps (PWA), which allow users and developers to go around the App Store and Google Play Store entirely. Instead of a proprietary “store,” PWAs are accessed through a mobile browser. But their user interface and experience are virtually indistinguishable from those of traditional apps—no need to worry about awkward web interfaces or pop-up ads.

Most impressive of all, PWAs let you download a shortcut to the game’s URL. This shortcut takes the form of an icon that looks exactly like all the other apps on a smartphone’s home screen. All of this adds up to a new way to develop and download mobile games—one free of the duopoly power and market distortions of the current system.

Some people might ask: Why do we need to change this paradigm at all? After all, why fix something that does not appear to many people to be broken?

The answer is that merely adequate isn’t good enough. People may enjoy the games they download, but they’ll never know what kinds of amazing experiences they never got to try. Why? Maybe Apple summarily rejected them, or maybe the App Store’s fees were too high for a solo developer just starting out. The internet has always been about the possible, not the acceptable. It’s time for us to take that same approach when it comes to mobile games.

And it’s not just gatekeeping that PWAs stand to disrupt. We are on the cusp of a whole new framework for games and the vast number of people who play them. The gaming community has been growing more diffuse and decentralized for years, and at the same time, it is growing more unified. More and more people are able to play games together, regardless of where they physically are in the world.

It’s natural that this evolution should continue and that communities should find new ways to communicate, collaborate and play.

New Framework for Gaming Communities

The future of gaming runs, in large part, through messaging apps.

People increasingly congregate online through platforms like Telegram, Discord and Signal, and gamers have been at the leading edge of this trend. And the melding of popular messaging apps with these communities is a natural outcome of the grassroots growth of mobile gaming as a whole.

Mobile games can now gain virality through messaging apps like Telegram in a way that App Store games just can’t replicate. Simply put, the internet is democratizing, whether tech behemoths want it to or not. And gaming, a massive industry in its own right, is at the vanguard of this evolution.

Where We’re Headed

What does this decentralized, democratized, PWA-driven future look like? Imagine a world where developers can share their products widely and seamlessly through the open networks where gamers themselves congregate. A world in which all parties can innovate and collaborate without being subject to the arbitrary diktats of the tech titans. A world free of walled gardens.

Almost two decades ago, the iPhone changed the world. But in 2024 its centralized app store model has become an obstacle to progress. The good news is we don’t need Apple to change in order to move the world of mobile gaming forward. We have the technology to make gaming more dynamic, more democratic and more accessible to the billions of gamers around the world. Now we just have to do it.

Tomer Pascal is co-founder and CEO of OwnPlay, the gaming studio behind CityVerse Tycoon, a premier Web3 city-building game that offers players a unique opportunity to create and manage their own virtual cities.