Mobile games have come a long way since the first successful one – Snake, on Nokia’s 6110 – has showed us that phones are good for more than just calling and texting. It took them long enough – next year it will be two decades since the above mentioned game was launched – but they finally made it: today it’s easier to play on the go than ever. Now we have better mobile hardware, faster mobile internet connections, and more exciting mobile games than ever before. And things will only improve in the future.

But let’s take a look at what people play on the go today.

The simpler, the better

Smartphones have become everyone’s favorite plaything. Today more people than ever are engaging with mobile games, and their vast majority play simple puzzles and so-called “social games” on their phones. According to a recent statistic, social games, puzzles, word games, and similar titles are played by more than half of all smartphone users all over the world.

Smartphones have boosted the reach of real money online games, too. Today the Euro Palace mobile casino is more accessible than ever, thanks to the emergence of a new gaming platform: HTML5. Built using this technology, the games at the Euro Palace mobile casino run on virtually any device that runs a HTML5-capable browser. It’s not confined to smartphones alone – Euro Palace players can use their tablet computers, gaming consoles, and even their smart TVs to run their games. Euro Palace offers its players an ever-growing collection of mobile games, with new titles added to the list every day.

Augmented reality

Combining reality with computer-generated characters is not a new concept, but it has only become mainstream with the launch of Pokemon GO this year. Such games – often referred to as “mixed reality” – were available before, but none of them has seen the same success as this year’s biggest hit. Since this Pokemon GO was this successful, we can expect similar games to be released in the near future. One of them, hopefully, will be one demanded by tens of thousands of users all over the world: Harry Potter GO, a mixed reality game based on J. K. Rowling’s magical universe.

Console-grade graphics

While the number of players engaging in complex, hardware-heavy games is relatively small, the games themselves keep appearing one after another. Making use of the latest improvements in smartphone technology, these games are putting most portable consoles – and some desktop ones, too – to shame with their elaborate visuals and massively multiplayer action. These are the games that take mobile gaming to the next level, and drive the development of smartphone hardware – much like PC games have driven the evolution of desktop hardware a few years ago.