True, mobile market is growing, and it will keep growing because mobiles... are nice, you carry a lot of processing power anywhere you go.
But from a development point of view, this is not the future we are looking for. There's a catch with mobiles.The culture around applications doesn't improve, it's either free-to-play or ad-based revenue. This means that you either have a lot of marketing power (that's how you get to beat the top apps ) or a game that has an established fan base somewhere else.
So what does the mobile market need to become a real place where developers thrive? We need help from the platform holders. People who buy a $400 console, expect to pay from $5 to $50 per a piece of software (in this case a game). People who buy a $600 mobile phone, expect to pay nothing or $1 dollar for every piece of software they have available.
Getting the platform holder to actually push games that cost more than a dollar will be very important in the following years, because it creates culture, if people believe that it's normal to pay $10 for a game that will get them a lot of hours of fun and joy, then they will pay it. BUT, this means that the platform needs some curation to make sure that whatever goes in it, is actually worth those $10, and curation costs money (or you can do what Steam does :D).
Another way to deal with this, is less conventional, is coming up with a mobile alternative to the play store, a sort of "mobile" Steam where you could actually put your games, and have control over the economy of the platform, that way, if a lot of high quality products have normal, accessible prices and can be found in that platform, players will come to it, they always do.
Now, I have big hopes for the mobile market, don't get me wrong. But right now, it's a toxic, copyright infringement over populated new world. And we are staying away for a while. Sure, there are success stories, but the amount of failures and problem just don't justify taking such a leap of fate. Here's to mobile gaming, so that it one become the promised land.
