GDC: The Mobile Game Industry

We attended the last half of the "State of the Mobile Games Industry" discussion this morning at the GDC. Most of the members on the panel had a lot of cogent points to think about.

- porting games to the hundreds of devices out there might be one way of a developer getting his/her foot in the industry door (not least of which is the fact that few actually want to just do porting)
- we should see a marked increase in the quality of mobile games as carriers demand it and competition warrants it
- the demographics for mobile gaming is roughly the same as "those who have indoor plumbing" (a great quote from Greg Ballard, though I think an exaggeration for comic effect)
- innovation may be more important than porting or branding for recognition

This last point was an important one to me: The Mobile Game Industry is poised to become a Big Thing (tm) but it's not there yet. The reason is that we haven't seen the killer app that pushes it over the edge and convinces everyone that the mobile is a viable platform for gaming (Greg Ballard drew analogy to "Resident Evil" proving that the Sony PlayStation offered anything over existing game consoles).

I think another important point that may have been missed is that the industry could benefit from improved feedback from the developers to the hardware manufacturers. I think about how Carmack helps to drive the evolution of the GPU and I wonder if the Mobile Game Industry needs a similar icon...I nominate me...

Check out Rob's blog for more in-depth discussion...