As we come to the end of 2013, it's time to look back at the events that dominated the last 12 months in mobile gaming.

As such, we've asked the industry's great and good to give their take on the last year, as well as predicting the trends that will come to pass in 2014.

Having previously served as a game consultant, designer and, more recently, a TechCrunch columnist, Tadhg Kelly manages Ouya's relationships with developers and is the platform's "free-to-play guy."

What do you think was the most significant event for the mobile games industry in 2013?

It has to be the rise in cost-per-install. Not the most positive story alas, but its chilling effects all across the industry - particularly on the investment front - are unmistakeable.

Of course there's also been some great success stories along the way - such as Puzzle & Dragons - but overall the climate in mobile has gone from easy-money to a lot of scrambling in a very short time.

What was the most significant event for your company?

Well at Jawfish [where Tadhg served as creative director] the CPI issue was the big one. We realised that although the company had a great tech and a clear vision for where it wanted to be, the market conditions were - and still are - squeezing out the low and middle tier.

Several bigger companies in particular started to spend huge just to acquire users. That’s why we pivoted to focus more on becoming a technology company, and I hear many stories of others trying to do the same.

At Ouya, on the other hand, it's been interesting. A lot of mobile developers are on the search for the next big wave, the next venue where they can find success away through innovation rather than brute spending power.

We're receiving a lot of approaches as a result, and a lot of goodwill from devs.

What was your favourite mobile game of the year?

Ridiculous Fishing is one that really sticks in my mind many months after I played it, with honorable mentions going to Impossible Road, Dots and Star Command.

I also want to include Oceanhorn in the list of honorable mentions but as I've only just started with it that could be more of a case of early-blush.

One thing I have noticed is that my play patterns in mobile have shifted over to tablet much more than actually playing games on my phone, and for most of the above my iPad was the natural place to play all of the above.

Pixels on Toast's Impossible Road

What do you predict will be the most important trends in 2014?

The next phase in mobile is all about depth. The market itself is still growing hugely but the opportunities to dive in with low-hanging-fruit games have reduced.

We just don't see a lot of breakout hits in the vein of Dots or Draw Something any more, which indicates a certain degree of maturation. Yet at the same time there are no indicators that mobile game players are getting bored of games - unlike as happened on Facebook.

Mobile offers considerably greater scope for richer games than we’ve already seen, but it'll cost.

So I think we'll see Kristian Segerstrale's prediction about the increases in development budgets come true, and it may even prove to be low-balling it.

I think we'll see a lot more involvement with publishing and financing operations making 20 bets at a time in the hope that one will be a success - sort-of similar to the way the original PlayStation economy worked 15 years ago.

Titles like Oceanhorn, for example, are very indicative of this trend by placing a lot of development in graphics, story, and all the rest of it.

I also think we'll see a lot of shakeout of small independent players in mobile too - although there may yet be openings for them in smaller platforms like Windows Phone - and some may even talk about a big crash or slowdown in those sectors.

Some sub-genres like social casino are particularly vulnerable to this effect, but I expect that we'll see it all across the industry next year.

VC money is not nearly as available as it was and the emerging publishing sector is not eager to fill in that breach. In a similar vein I expect the number of advertising, cross promotion, analytics and other provides to consolidate.

That doesn't mean it's all over for novelty games, but, more speculatively, that business might turn into something more like the old web game-a-day model, where a number of providers focus on getting lots of very small free games made with tiny budgets and cycle through a user base through them like daily-treat novelties.

It's already been tried with app-a-day - which ran into some bumps with Apple admittedly - but done right it may well work.

What's your New Year's resolution and what resolution would you enforce on the industry?

Mine is to get my damn book written - more details coming soon.

For the industry I think the biggest resolution I would enforce is for Apple to produce a standard iJoypad. As a form factor mobile is starting to become hampered by only being touch-based, and increasingly games feel stuck by it.

Games particularly relying on action game dynamics feel somewhat muted in comparison to handhelds, and there a number of genres missing or underserved in mobile as a result.

While I think it's a good first step for big-A to have released a controller specification, the initial pads we've seen look pretty terrible and the overall support for the initiative is low.

How do you convince the majority of developers to add support, or even custom-build games for, something like that if it doesn't come from the platform itself? You don't. It would be like Microsoft relying on third parties to build Kinects.

So if mobile is to embrace a wider range of control types and therefore deeper games - similar to the Vita and the 2DS and 3DS - then that effort has to come from Apple.

I imagine a nicely designed slip case that overlays controls where the black dead zones are in the current iPhone and iPad designs - to the left and right of the Home button and the speakers - and also acts as an extra battery. I imagine it doesn't look dorky or bulky.

I also imagine that the App Store had a specific section for pad-enabled games. Not everyone would buy in but my guess is that if 25 percent of the current mobile market did then that would be enough to kickstart a whole new revolution in mobile games, and then other manufacturers and platforms would follow.

It might sound a bit like a pipe dream admittedly, but then so was the idea that one day we’d use touch interfaces that didn't need styluses. Yet here we are.

It's also conceivable that Microsoft might decide to try first, as part of its constant push to have Windows Phone and Surface gain mindshare. Now that they're snapping up the bulk of Nokia they effectively have their own hardware division a la Apple, so who knows?

It could be for them to make the next bold move.

Thanks to Tadhg for his time.