In the same time period, 44% of households with mobile phones in the UK quickly grew to 76%.īrands like Nokia, Motorola, Siemens and Sony Ericsson, had their comfortable market share in the mobile phones business, but Nokia decided to branch out and expand itself to compete outside of this market, becoming a direct competitor to portable games, after all, they already had a platform for games on the move.The N-Gage felt like the obvious step forward, a console that can make phone calls or a cell phone with AAA games sounds great and it was…well, in theory, it was. In the year 2000, 97 million people were subscribed to a cell phone plan in the US and in 2003, that number went up to 148 million. Mobile games were set: developers had the tools to develop, they had a platform which was ready but still evolving and now they also had the market to sell to. (Don’t forget to check Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 first) It’s time to wrap up our journey across the history of mobile gaming: from Nokia’s flops to Pokémon Go!, joins us while we explore the ups and downs of the industry in this last chapter.