Tough Road for Mobile Games

From MocoNews, Mitch Lasky talks about the hard road ahead for mobile games.

From the post:

"Mitch Lasky, senior VP of mobile at EA and former CEO of Jamdat, has told the GDC conference his ideas of why mobile games are stagnating. “There are too many bad games. The fact is, most games suck. It’s the greatest danger to the future of this business. There’s a real danger of an Atari 2600 episode here, given the oversupply of poor quality content, followed by consumers abandoning the platform.”

Other reasons for the stagnation include:

• A lack of decent mulitplayer games. “A casual mobile version of World of Warcraft will blow the lid off this industry, not a hardcore RPG, but something that has that social feel.”
• Unpredictable business models. “Carriers will not grow this business by squeezing publishers. This is not the ringtone business,” he said. “We actually make stuff.”
• An unpleasent shopping experience on mobile phones.

“He warned that mid-size competitors could struggle in the next few years. “It’s too late for mid-sized publishers who are barely profitable and don’t own hits.” However, he said that there is an enormous opprotunity for “small, tightly-focused development teams with original product.”