Never gonna happen until people are willing to pay more than 99 cents for a mobile phone game

You missed the point I'm trying to make. I'm saying that because more people are playing video games, crappy or not, video games will reach a much larger audience. Eventually those crappy games will get bigger, just like console games before them. It's the natural progression of things. As they gradually become less and less discernable from "real" games, they open the door to a much wider audience to accept gaming as the same as television or book reading.

That's why I said the next step forward, mobile gaming, is a huge leap back, in quality. It's the gaming world's equivalent to the fall of Rome. Games will rebound much the same way Western civilization did.

Believe it or not, some people who play those crappy phone games consider themselves gamers, whereas we would not. Just the fact these people are willing to label themselves as such is a sign of progress.

Actually, the last time this happened, it happened with console games, and it resulted in a crash. If anything, mobile games are the "Rome" that's going to "fall". From their ashes there might rise a mobile game company that becomes the Nintendo of mobile gaming, or a handful of such companies, but console and PC gaming will continue through all of that, and still be around afterwards, though as technology progresses all three sections of the industry might look very different from today. Also, the people who play mobile games and label themselves gamers don't really think like gamers. They would never use the term gamer out of the context of someone asking them if they're a gamer, because the term means nothing to them. Real progress would be if the term "gamer" lost its meaning to actual gamers, not from people throwing the term around to whom it means nothing to begin with.

People cant make games like TLOU and sell it for a buck. Thats what the mobile market is all about.