The Game Developers Conference is currently underway in the US, and a number of keynote speeches and industry panels have already come out on the state and quality of mobile gaming.

Mitch Lasky, senior VP of mobile at EA and former CEO of Jamdat, in a speech entitled The Future of Mobile Gaming and its Enemies covered four primary reasons he saw for the stagnation of the mobile games business.

He said bluntly, "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."

He said the ideal number of games available should be about half of that which most carriers hold. "It's crazy that games like Tetris and Madden are getting the same attention from carriers as some Chinese whack-a-mole game." He also pointed out that the top 20 mobile games generated the top 93 percent of revenues, while most carriers are offering up to 400 games.

He also discusses the lack of multiplayer games for mobile, something hampered, at least in the UK, by developer apathy and the high cost of data transfer. Also touched on are the subjects of unpredictable business models, both for carriers and developers, and the poor experience that customers have when buying mobile games.

A panel later in the day, featuring participants from Orange, Verizon, Cingular, Virgin, Sprint Nextel and Vodafone called for developers and publishers to increase the quality of their games.

Jason Ford, general manager for games and entertainment at Sprint Nextel, said, "We reject about 30 games a month because so many of them are offering the same gameplay over and over again. Lots of these games just aren't fun, offering wretched controls. Many of them are mediocre at best."

He added, "If you put a brand on a game, you elevate the consumer's expectation of that game, so the publisher needs to make it a very good experience in order to satisfy the consumer."

This attitude from the carriers is refreshing, and marks a change in attitude. (One carrier's content manager once told me "If it's not branded or not in 3D, we won't even look at it".)

Overall, the call was again for a higher quality in game content.

The general concensus was that fewer and better games would be offered in the future, and that they would be organized and sold more coherently.