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Recently much news has been made of a shift in Apple’s policy towards their most popular product, the iPhone, and its huge iOS ecosystem of apps. This came about due to new EU legislation called the Digital Markets Act that is designed to restrict monopolistic practices that have prompted Apple for the first time to permit competitors to its App Store to be freely accessed on its devices.
While this may seem like a minor shift, it’s broadly seen as a win for iPhone users who will now get to freely choose among a wide array of alternative app providers – platforms that crucially furnish mobile gamers with experiences they’re not accustomed to through the official app store. Among these novel experiences hitting the iOS network for the first time is game emulators.
For the uninitiated, emulators are virtual consoles that enable people to play old games on their iPhone – from PlayStation 1 titles, to the Sega Genesis and even Nintendo 64. But what many do not realize is that there were already a host of exciting alternatives to the app store to explore for gamers looking for new thrills beyond the standard freemium fare, such as the options we’ll explore here below.
Long before the rise of the smartphone, people played mini-games online on their web browsers with popular codecs like Macromedia Flash – and today’s HTML5 – enabling fluid animations and immersive gameplay.
Sometimes it can be easy to forget that the iPhone, for all its bells and whistles, is still just a computer replete with its own web surfing capabilities. That means that should you choose to forgo the thrills of the App Store, there’s a whole world of gaming out there online on the regular old internet for you to enjoy.
In fact, certain segments of the gaming industry – like emulators – are historically underrepresented on the App Store, and can best be enjoyed through Safari, Chrome or another browser of your choosing. Among these is the online casino sector, where one can find dedicated platforms like Vegasslots online that offer thousands of unique mobile-optimized slots titles to encounter. Platforms such as these are also frequently home to toplists of welcome offers and sign-up bonuses for affiliated gaming providers, facilitating discovery of new titles and experiences and saving you money in the process.
Elsewhere, all the classic gaming portals of yesteryear are still going strong, from Miniclip, to Newgrounds, each with hundreds of diverse minigames worth your time. For social integration, you may also want to see what Facebook Instant Games has to offer too – with many HTML5 hits available there for you to challenge your friends on.
When Netflix began offering streaming to its customers it was revolutionary as it created new ways to access and enjoy content on-demand. What’s more, it removed the necessity for its customers to own proprietary hardware, such as Blu Ray Player, to enjoy it.
That’s why cloud gaming, a novel suite of technologies emerging from the games industry, is so exciting as it aims to do for gaming what Netflix did for TV and movies. Games consoles are more expensive than ever, as are the latest games, but services like Xbox Cloud Gaming – which comes bundled with the top-tier Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription – offer hundreds of titles all for a single monthly fee.
The best part? You don’t even need to own an Xbox to play the latest Halo, Forza or Call of Duty releases. That’s because all the graphical horsepower and computational work takes place server-side at the behest of Microsoft. As a result of this, iPhone gamers can legitimately play day-one releases of Xbox Series X games on their devices – even older phones – providing they have access to a good internet connection.
Of course to get the most out of the experience you’ll want to ditch touch controls for something responsive, and there’s dozens of exciting game controller add-ons out there for the iPhone. What’s more, most modern console game controllers are compatible with smartphones thanks to their bluetooth connectivity, so even an old PS3 controller you have lying around should do the trick.
Cloud gaming is going to be massive one day, but is still very much in its infancy. It could well be the best kept secret in gaming in 2024, so make sure to get in on the action.
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