I think it comes more down to economics. There’s more money to be made from ad filled games and the freemium model than there is for high budget games (so much so for the matter that you see the freemium model creep into non-mobile gaming too).
I’m the early days of smart phone gaming there was a brief push for immersive 3D games like Deadspace. The games were good but not enough people were willing to pay for it when gamers generally already had better devices for gaming on.
Backtrack a few more years, before ads were prevalent on phones, and you had a massive library of Java based games for feature phones plus Windows CE / PocketPC ports of popular PC games (like Tomb Raider). In fact this market appeared to be growing so much that Nokia released a phone/ console hybrid device (the Nokia N-Gage).
So there was a culture of bringing quality titles to mobile phones and PDA but the economics wasn’t there.
I’m the early days of smart phone gaming there was a brief push for immersive 3D games like Deadspace. The games were good but not enough people were willing to pay for it when gamers generally already had better devices for gaming on.
Backtrack a few more years, before ads were prevalent on phones, and you had a massive library of Java based games for feature phones plus Windows CE / PocketPC ports of popular PC games (like Tomb Raider). In fact this market appeared to be growing so much that Nokia released a phone/ console hybrid device (the Nokia N-Gage).
So there was a culture of bringing quality titles to mobile phones and PDA but the economics wasn’t there.