Mobile games are a fast-growing industry because almost everyone has a smartphone these days, so the target audience is huge.
But of course, not everyone has a high-end device that is also designed for gaming.
Can the heavy usage of my phone by mobile games maybe even damage my smartphone in the long run?
The simple answer to this question is that any resource-intensive app affects your phone.
I won’t call its effect harmful because these smartphones are intended to be used. I mean, what good is a phone if it can’t be used?
After all, they are designed to be used. It is not a collectible that should be stored in a box with the value increasing over time.
Note: This article was written in English. Translations into other languages may not provide the same linguistic quality. We apologize for grammatical and semantic errors.
Most games these days are resource guzzlers. As a result of such hardware-intensive gaming, phones often heat up, and memory along with RAM usage are also involved in the process.
However, this by no means harms your phone in a way that renders it unusable after a while.
People who use their phones for gaming report that despite doing so, they do not notice that the phone becomes unusable due to any permanent harm.
For older phones with less RAM, issues with the phone getting stuck during gameplay are common, but the harm does not cause this that a gaming title causes to your phone. Instead, this happens due to the phone’s insufficient memory.
Mobile games are also designed in a way that they use the phone’s battery extensively.
Heat issues are also common, but phones designed for gaming solve this problem using specially designed larger heat sinks.
Another point I’d like to emphasize is that it’s not just games that consume your phone’s resources. Other features, such as GPS and several other apps, do the same.
As a result, simply stating that mobile games are harmful to your phone is not correct.
Do Games Make Your Phone Slower?
To answer this question, you first to understand how a phone operates and what slows it down.
The RAM on your device is where the apps and programs are temporarily stored, whereas the storage of a device is where the files and apps are installed. These apps stay permanently in the storage of the phone, as long as you don’t delete them.
When a device is overloaded, its performance takes a hit.
There are two ways in which the performance of a device is affected.
The first is when you open a large number of apps on your phone, so much so that the RAM of the device falls short, and your phone starts to hang or stutter.
A similar situation occurs when the apps open on your phone consume more RAM than is available. In this case, the phone also becomes slow and starts lagging.
Besides this, once the storage space of your phone is consumed by over 90%, you will start feeling that your phone has started to become considerably slow.
Modern-day smartphones have ample storage space. Mostly they are over 32 GB and range up to 512GB for flagship devices.
As no single smartphone game can occupy this much space, it won’t be right to blame just a single game for slowing down the smartphone.
However, if your phone has limited storage space due to already installed apps or other data on it, and then you install multiple heavy-duty games on it, the device will definitely slow down.
As excess of everything is bad, installing too many games and then opening several heavy-duty apps concurrently can slow down your phone.
However, this won’t be permanent, and as soon as you clear the memory on your device, it will be restored to its previous performance level.
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Does Mobile Gaming Reduce Battery Life?
Most modern games make excessive use of GPUs. This is why you would see that the graphics processing capability of modern smartphones is much higher than what we had 5 years ago.
While these GPUs have become more power efficient over the years, their excessive usage still requires a lot of battery to give you an immersive gameplay experience. Thus, the more games you play on your phone, the higher the battery drain.
As you might know, when batteries are used over time, and their battery cycles are used, their health starts taking a hit.
Apple’s iPhone has this feature in which the phone displays the battery health in the form of a percentage.
You will notice that the more the usage of your device is, the quicker the depreciation in the battery health of your phone.
This means that there’s a directly proportional relationship between usage and battery degradation.
As games are some of the most resource-hungry apps available on the smartphone platform, playing a large number of games for elongated periods will undoubtedly reduce your device’s battery life.
There is no set rate at which these games affect batteries because it is determined by a variety of factors, including the manufacturer of the battery.
Because different smartphone manufacturers use different batteries, the effect of gaming on the battery life varies with the phone’s model.
However, it has been observed that the effect of gaming in reducing the battery life of Apple’s iPhone is considerably lesser than that for even the flagship Android devices.
Is It Okay To Play Mobile Games While Charging?
This question can be viewed from two perspectives. The first is concerned with the device’s health, while the second, and more importantly, is concerned with the phone user’s safety.
Research suggests that playing mobile gaming or using other apps on your smartphone while it is charging is not harmful to your devices.
It is true that when a phone is charging, it produces more heat. This, combined with the increased amount of heat produced by the phone during heavy-duty gameplay, can result in a nagging experience in which the phone becomes too hot and you feel uncomfortable even touching it.
This excessive heat won’t damage the phone permanently.
That’s because modern-day phones, especially the ones for gaming, have specially designed mechanisms for dissipating the heat effectively.
With that said, let’s now move over to the second aspect, in which we’ll discuss whether or not it is safe for you to play games on your phone while it is charging.
The excessive heat produced by the phone during the charging process is the first thing that is bad for your health. Doctors warn that applying heat to only one part of the body can result in a temperature imbalance, which is harmful to your health.
However, the more serious aspect of this question pertains to the safety of human beings.
Electric current is involved in the process of charging your phones. The cables connected to your phone supply this current.
These cables usually are well insulated to safeguard the users. However, in case they are somehow bruised, the phone user has the chance of touching live cables.
It should also be noted that high-end phones are made of metal. Therefore, while there is a lot of protection in these phones to prevent them from giving users an electric shock while charging, there is always the possibility of a mishap.
Thus, we recommend that you don’t use your phone for gaming purposes while it is charging.
This not just keeps you safe but also prevents your phone from overheating.
Final Thoughts
In conclusion, as with laptops, desktop PCs, or even tablets, it can also be said for cell phones that gaming puts the highest load on such a device and thus also leads to more wear and tear, and at some point, your device will therefore also give up the ghost.
However, that’s what devices are for, and nothing lasts forever.
Accordingly, to drastically shorten the lifespan of your cell phone, you have to play excessive resource-hungry games for a long time.
By the way, in the first-person shooter sector, the most successful game internationally is one that tries explicitly to devour as few hardware resources as possible.
If you’re interested in which game that is, then take a look at this article:
Masakari out – moep, moep.
Former pro gamer Andreas "Masakari" Mamerow has been an active gamer for over 35 years, more than 20 of them in the competitive scene (Esports). In CS 1.5/1.6, PUBG and Valorant, he has led and coached teams at the highest level. Old dogs bite better...
