First there was the online poker boom in the 2000s, then there was the mobile poker explosion in the 2010s. The iconic card game has been at the forefront of major technological developments over the last two decades, and looks primed to continue setting the benchmark for other games. The meteoric rise of poker’s popularity led to the emergence of a number of fantasy card games in the internet era. And since poker has made the switch to mobile, these other games have also followed suit.

Poker

When smartphones began to rise in popularity over the last decade, the mobile games market blew up with it and now makes up 60 percent of global game revenue according to data from here: mobilemarketer.com. Online poker providers saw this growing market and realized they needed to begin gearing their games towards it.

Now when players play poker online here: poker.paddpower.com, they can see that there are options to play on mobile or desktop. No matter which device they play on, they have access to the same games. The use of HTML5 mark-up language means that the games are tailored to any screen.

Hearthstone

The success of poker as a mobile game led other developers to follow suit, and Blizzard Entertainment was quick to do it with its fantasy card game, Hearthstone. Indeed, the game came out on iOS a mere month after its Windows release in March of 2014. The Android version swiftly followed in December of the same year.

The accessibility of Hearthstone has been the cornerstone of its success, and it has more than 100 million players according to this: venturebeat.com. This has led it to become one of the leading eSports, and it has set the standard for other new card games to follow.

Gwent

Gwent is one of the newest fantasy card games on the market, but some people are speculating that it could challenge Hearthstone in the years to come. The game borrows a lot of elements from poker in that the developers, CD Projekt Red, have aimed to minimalize the instances of RNG effects and have focused on skill-based mechanics.

Gwent is still a fairly new option in the fantasy card game genre. From its inception, it took a long time for it to be released on mobile. The game first appeared in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt in 2015. It was then officially released as a standalone game om Windows in October 2018. From that point, it took a full year to get an iOS release and then there was another five month wait for the Android version. Since coming to mobile, the gameplay has been refined and it should be considered as one of the most visually appealing card games for the portable platform.

Mobile players are spoilt for choice when it comes to card game apps. Poker was the giant that started it all and inspired others, but there are new games emerging which are also highly appealing. Each of these offerings only takes a few minutes to learn, but a long time to truly master.