more power for new tablets means games more similar to console ones. of course there will be more space for big companies, while the price will still be low, they will focus on high quantities of sells.

anyway, small teams will still have their space, people will still buy little and cool casual games and detailed games don't need huge graphics to be detailed. (as example, deep and complex roguelikes).

AppStore is similar, with paid voting services which put you in top spot. For company, all of these mean expenses. For indies, you either come up with $1000 to buy enough votes and risk getting banned, or take the chance with being featured. Either way, if you want predictable results, it's far from free.

I've always seen those "voting services" as scams living off the hopes of novice developers and businesspeople and not something that actually works...
We've for sure never used any.

The number one factor for getting featured is to make an innovative and fun game, that shows off the platform. Really.

It would be interesting to see how well mobile processors and GPUs compare to the non-mobile ones, either today's, or at which point in the past they were comparable. Anyone have links to benchmarks?

I don't have a clue about ipads, but I know that even small mobile devices like Samsung's Galaxy Nexus has specs that generally seem comparable to even desktop PCs of less than 10 years ago. And for years, phones have had GPUs, which put them at least comparable to PCs of the late 90s?

So that gives us some answer already - 10-15 years ago, IIRC mainstream/popular commercial games were already much the domain of companies. Another obvious point would be netbooks - are AAA game developers targetting them? The answer seems to be that they would still rather target modern fast devices like laptops/desktops, rather than dumbing down for tablets.

On the flipside though, I think mobile development will still increasingly become harder for individuals and small companies - not because of specs, but just because of cut-throat competition. Yes, we hear occasional stories of one-man-jobs making millions, but how likely is that chance for any given developer?

Also consider that yesterday's indies become tomorrow's mainstream big companies that no one else can compete with. E.g., I look on Google Play for Android, and I see prominent advertising given to all the Angry Birds games, yet if I as an individual upload a game, the problem is that most people never see it. Indeed, it's so bad that I actually get better downloads from the Windows version from my website. (Interestingly I note that I get 100-200 *times* as many downloads for Symbian from the Nokia Store, so there is variation among platforms and download sites, but I think ultimately, anywhere where people perceive a "gold rush" will quickly be outswamped by competition.) Windows download sites seem to have a similar problem. E.g., download.com is the #1 download site, and it's not that people don't download - the most successful apps have something like millions per week. Yet I've found it's useless for getting coverage for anything I upload there - hardly any downloads at all, and far less compared with simply advertising on places like Freecode, or simply my own website. I guess places like Google Play are heading in that direction - loads of downloads, but increasingly hard for anyone who isn't already established, or spending lots of effort/money to independently advertise it.

Once upon a time, games like Doom and Worms were examples of a successful game from a small company or individuals. Now ID Software is a company that small companies can't hope to with, and the Worms franchise is something that individuals can't compete with. Similarly, I don't see any evidence that the mainstream will be dominated by indies on mobile devices. (They'll still exist, sure, but they still do on desktop Windows and Linux too.)

On price, I don't see why people wouldn't pay $50 for a game they play a lot if it's a device they want to use a lot. Similarly people might pay $1 for a Windows app that they like. The main reason we probably don't see very-low-cost apps on Windows is because anything that simple would easily have competition from things available for free. I wonder if we'll see this trend on mobiles in future too.

On price, I don't see why people wouldn't pay $50 for a game they play a lot if it's a device they want to use a lot.[/quote]

It's not a technical problem.

Perceived value, branding, peer pressure, trends, economy, laws, ...

Why do people sip $6 lattes while playing with their iPad, but will go into mad rage when over the price of a $1 game.

And related topic, why do people pay $400 for Radeon from Apple yet will bitch and moan over identical card (same batch) being $199 instead of $189 from other retailers?

If you know the answer, you'll become very rich. Any of the big publishers will pay you $1 billion easily for something that works reliably.