Apple's phone quietly becomes the most common game machine

What happened

Three pieces of the phone mattered for games, though nobody presented it that way at the time. The screen responded to multiple fingers at once and filled the front of the device, removing the keypad that had constrained mobile software. An accelerometer let the phone sense how it was being held and tilted. And there was real graphics hardware inside, capable of work that dedicated handhelds were doing. Together these made a games machine that happened to make calls.

At launch, though, outside developers could not install anything on it. Apple's initial position was that third parties should build for the browser, a stance that satisfied almost nobody and lasted about a year. What the phone did immediately was change what people expected a pocket device to be. Carriers lost their grip on what a handset could run, and the distinction between a phone, a music player and a small computer stopped being meaningful.

Within a few years the consequences for games were enormous. Hundreds of millions of people who would never buy a console or a handheld were carrying a device capable of running games, and they did not have to make a decision to become players. The audience for the medium expanded by an order of magnitude, and the economics of that audience, built on very low prices and enormous scale, were unlike anything the industry had dealt with before.

The world at the time

Mobile games in 2007 were simple, sold through carrier menus, and constrained by tiny screens and numeric keypads. Nokia's attempt at a dedicated gaming phone had failed a few years earlier. Nintendo and Sony split the handheld market between them, and nobody in the games business regarded phone manufacturers as competitors.

What it changed

Opening the device to outside software the following year produced the App Store and, with it, the modern mobile game business. Competing phone platforms adopted the same shape. Dedicated handheld sales eventually fell as casual portable play migrated to phones, and free-to-play monetization developed on mobile before spreading back to consoles and computers.