So Dave, Jim and myself are down here in San Francisco for GDC and we've just come back from the kick off of GDC Mobile where Trip Hawkins of EA, 3DO, and now mobile developer, Digital Chocolate, fame.

Trip was here to talk about the poor state of the mobile games industry and discuss ways to pull the industry out of the fire. Instead, Trip talked about the importance to move people around the fire, so they socially discuss games and so people will talk about what they like, hopefully encouraging people to buy more. The social aspect is one of the most important area mobile games need to improve, because right now if people talk about mobile games, they have nothing good to say.

Trip made mention of his time at EA too. He talked about his decision to develop for the Commodore 64 rather than the Atari 2600 then wanting to move to the Genesis because of the idea of having more complex two player experiences. He also made mention of how this changed EA. "One of our company values was quality and we dropped it, although I think some of you know that..." Instead, they ended up adding customer satisfaction because they deemed it more important to try and give consumers what they wanted.

Trip also talked about the overcrowded license market and how more original titles will encourage the growth of the industry. Trip also talked about the royalty fees that a major licensor imposed awhile back. For GameBoy games it was 4%, for Playstation it was about 7%, online stuff it was about 11%, and for mobile games it was about 50%. This type of abuse causes the quality of games to be lower and as a result, the consumer, the publisher and the developer all end up getting burned.

Ultimately, Trip sees the mobile market as just beginning and the asian market as being a sort of look into the near future for what will happen in the US and Europe. He put alot of the burden of the failure of the mobile market on quality of games, poor user interfaces, the low reach mobile games have, and the necessity of games to be clever. Trip seems to think that overcoming these problems will catapult the mobile market into the next stratosphere and that games that promote "just killing time by ourselves isn't enough".

I think Trip has it right. By making games more fun, and changing how they're marketed, you'll improve the experience and people will want to talk about what they're playing and share their fun experiences with others. Hell, I've never really had a good mobile game experience, Pac Man and Tetris are awful on my phone because of the terrible controls and the 24 game was a waste of time because its not fun to look at or play. The only game I've played on my phone worth any time at all was Diner Dash which was a bit fun for a while and looked pretty good.

What do you guys think? Do any of you even care about cell phone games? What has your experience been like with cell phone games and what would you do to improve it? Do you think this whole 'mobile cell phone game' thing will ever be big?