Wrapping up our mobile games-themed week, we take a look around the corner to find out what's next for mobile games. Make sure to check out our mobile event page for more development insight The mobile game space can be tremendously scary for developers. Unfortunately, it'll probably just get scarier as more and more games and apps are piled into already-crowded app stores. But perhaps you can prepare yourself -- arm yourself -- for the future, by understanding what lies ahead. So, we asked a few notable mobile game developers to let loose and make educated guesses about the future of the mobile game space.

A future of mobile, off of mobile

David Edery is CEO at Spry Fox, developer of successful games including Triple Town, Realm of the Mad God and Steambirds, which have collectively appeared on mobile, browser and PC. Looking forward, he expects increasing dominance of free-to-play on mobile -- that's not terribly surprising in itself, but he lays out a convincing argument as to why he thinks this will happen. "My guess is that the major mobile platforms will continue to struggle with the challenge of getting people to pay for games up-front," he says. "Any increases in game price from the base of 99 cents that developers achieve will be cancelled out by increasing development and marketing costs resulting from relentless competition and a polish bar that keeps rising. "Consequently, free-to-play games will continue to utterly dominate the mobile landscape both in terms of revenue and daily usage." Edery predicts that the "mega-hit" free-to-play games that are dominating mobile app stores today will rake in the revenues in the years ahead. But eventually even those will be usurped by newer, more advanced iterations -- "games that are the World of Warcraft to their EverQuest," says Edery. At the same time, top-grossing single-player free-to-play games will give way to more multiplayer free-to-play titles. The success of these kinds of games won't completely wreck the chances of original indie breakout successes, but the chances of achieving that hit indie title will be even harder a couple years from now. For Edery, the future of mobile just might be…off of mobile. "[All of these challenges in mobile] will matter less in some ways than it does today, because it will become increasingly common for developers to take their mobile games to Steam and consoles and vice-versa, so we as developers won't be making all our business and design decisions exclusively with mobile in mind. And depending on what happens in those other markets, mobile may or may not even be our primary consideration." Not everyone is considering a move away from mobile. Companies like Gree, which is behind some of the "mega-hit" free-to-play games such as Modern War and Crime City, are in it for the long haul.

Games for the long-term

Gree COO Anil Dharni, who founded successful mobile developer Funzio before it was acquired by Gree, identifies three trends that will impact mobile games' future: Advancements in the science of marketing and user acquisition, a keen focus on creating long-running franchises instead of one-off games and a greater focus on multiplayer social games on mobile. "Marketing and brand/franchise-building are going to be more and more important," says Dharni. "Understanding the needs and wants of your audience and knowing where and how to find that audience is what will help a game reach it’s full potential. "The number of apps fighting for attention has been growing at an astonishing rate, so developers and publishers will need to be strategic about marketing with the ultimate goal always being to understand acquisition and methodical spending." All of this involves making games that customers want to keep coming back to, says Dharni. Consider not only the way players spend money, but also the way they spend time, and create games that are made for the long-term. In the decade ahead, mobile devices will only become more ubiquitous and more powerful, and games will need to be there. "The future, as I see it, is simple gestures, smartphones and screens -- everywhere we go," he says. "Our world will be controlled and stored by a small device in our pocket."

Prepare yourself

Ben Cousins is someone who never backs down from a chance to prognosticate about the future of the game industry. At EA, he executive-produced core shooters in the Battlefield franchise, eventually taking on Battlefield Heroes and turning the online cartoonish shooter into a free-to-play money-maker. He then left EA for mobile game giant DeNA, releasing The Drowning and currently working on arcade-style shooter Lawless at DeNA-owned Scattered Entertainment. He's banking his career on his firm belief that mobile technologies are poised to disrupt the console-centric businesses he used to help build. In the next five years, Cousins expects the smarthphone and tablet games business to become better defined in key areas. "We'll see a serious maturation of the market in this timeframe," he predicts. "The path to success with a game will be much clearer [in terms of] genre, IP, game mechanics, monetization and social/viral features." He expects four or five dominant publishers and developers -- including more competition from Asia and Europe -- to vie for high placement on the top-grossing mobile game charts. The audience will only become more global, as emerging markets adopt mobile phones and tablets. All of this expansion doesn't necessarily translate into big opportunities for small developers. "It will be very hard for new entrants to have a hit unless they strike a deal with one of these publishers," says Cousins. "'Indie' games on these classes of devices will be essentially dead as a route to top-grossing status; Apple and Google will still support smaller developers with App Store and Google Play features, and this will result in those titles returning good profits for small developers." What else will happen in the coming five years? Cousins expects production values and development budgets for mobile games will become "similar" to PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 titles; mobile OSes will appear more frequently in other devices like TVs, consoles and wearable tech, giving smaller, specialized game developers less-crowded platforms to make games for; and a continued rapid expansion of installed base for mobile platforms. "It’s also very likely that one or more of the major game companies of today – someone we see as unbeatable and timeless -- will go into liquidation or be acquired," he adds. Looking out even further, it's up to people who are in the business of video games to arm themselves with the tools and knowledge to peer carefully over the horizon. Cousins is an outspoken advocate of the theories of Clayton M. Christensen, the renowned Harvard Business School professor who literally wrote the books on disruptive technologies, The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution. What will disrupt Android and iOS? That's the more interesting question for Cousins over the next 10 years. "The important thing to understand is the games industry is cyclic and predictable," says Cousins. "By understanding the cycles, and seeing in which part of those cycles a given platform or company is, it’s possible to make a business plan or design decisions with a greater degree of accuracy. "Many people talk about the chaos and unpredictability of the current games industry. I don't think this is the case. I see patterns, and those patterns are following predictable paths. Educate yourselves in the science of disruption!"