Game studios all over the world have been churning out thousands and thousands of mobile games ever since the start of the smartphone revolution, but Kabam Inc. president Aaron Loeb says that the mobile game industry is starting to see a shift that could end up culling some of the herd.

“Five years ago mobile could best be characterized as a market where the best attribute you could have as a developer was speed,” Loeb said in a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz. “Today, the best attribute you can have as a developer is reliability. That requires different studios, that requires different leadership, and that requires different ways of thinking about steering development.”

According to Loeb, more and more mobile gamers are demanding quality over quantity, and many of the mindless, low-effort games on the market today will not cut it for many of the mobile gamers of tomorrow.

“Games that are purely versions of Solitaire – minimal attention, brain-clearing exercises – will always have their place in mobile,” Loeb said, “but more sophisticated mobile consumers want games they can have meaningful relationships with. So characters they care about, and other players they can care about, in ways both good and ill.”

While he admits that casual mobile games will always have an audience, Loeb says that the current market saturation for low end titles is unsustainable, and many of those developers may disappear over the coming years.

“The way that mobile and free-to-play as they currently stand will be disrupted is not completely clear,” Loeb said. “The very low end of mobile game development seems likely to go away, or it will truly become like hoping to get hit by lightning. The developer who spends $20,000 throwing something on the marketplace really ought to put that $20,000 in a mutual fund. That’s just not very likely to produce any outcome.”

He added, “There’s so much competition, and so much quality product being created, that it will be very, very hard for those games. Harder than it has ever been.”

You can read the full interview with Loeb here.

Image courtesy of Kabam Inc