When you think of touchscreens, you probably think of a combination of personal mobile devices and embedded ones found in the workplace. While these are two of the biggest uses of them, they’ve actually grown and evolved with the gaming industry, too. Some of the earliest uses of modern touchscreens were found in video card machines. Present-day game designers are quickly finding a wide variety of applications for them that can make titles more challenging as well as more convenient to play than ever before. Take a look at these four areas of the gaming space that are absolutely dominated by the use of touchscreen technology.
1. Mobile Amusement Apps
Some of the most popular casual games have over 1.4 billion downloads, which just goes to show that cellular phones are for much more than just making calls. Early smartphone titles didn’t make terribly good use of touchscreen technology since they were essentially the same kind of games found on other platforms ported to a new class of device. Newer titles manipulate touch-based user interfaces in ways that designers could never have even thought of.
2. In-Person Game Machines
Everything from arcade games to video poker terminals rely on professional gaming touchscreen solutions to provide an interface for users. Physical controls have a tendency to wear out, which is why you used to see so many older arcade cabinets with broken joysticks and non-responsive buttons. Touchscreens don’t normally degrade as long as their glass housings remain in good shape. Proper cleaning and maintenance gives them a much longer lifespan than most other kinds of controls, which is good news for those who run any kind of in-person gaming experience. As an increasingly large number of businesses return to this model, this segment is likely to grow.
3. Home Video Consoles
Several home and portable consoles from the last few generations have used touchscreens as a form of alternative input that complements physical controls. In a few cases, there have been entire consoles that use nothing more than a touchscreen to play every game released for them. Predicting the future is difficult, but a number of computer industry journalists believe that several new products are on the horizon that use touchscreen inputs instead of controllers. That could potentially make them more affordable as well as durable.
4. Vintage Video Game Deployment
A proliferation of vintage gaming apps shows that the general public has a real interest in playing older eight and sixteen-bit console games on their phones and tablets. These have to be slightly redesigned to fit the paradigm presented by a device powered by touchscreens. That being said, it’s not hard to put simulated buttons on top of an existing user interface, thus allowing users to play a game using nothing but the same mobile device they use for all of their other online activities.
Engineers are always hard at work developing new types of gaming technologies, but it’s likely that many of them will include touchscreens in some way. Whether it’s mobile games, video games, or electronic table games, touchscreen technology plays an important part in the industry.