Gaming is “falling way short” of its potential, says industry veteran Will Wright.

Speaking with GamesIndustry, The Sims designer said that gaming needed to mature, but that unfortunately it had a long way to go.

"I think we have an extremely powerful medium here at our disposal, and I think we've only realised a small fraction of its potential," said Wright.

"It wouldn't take too many things to really impact a lot of people. Relative to what we have as a medium, with what we could be doing with it, we're falling way short."

However, the rise of independent games over the past couple of years had given him hope that change was underway.

"The fact that it's now ten thousand Darwinian developers out there with no restrictions on what they do, coming up with all sorts of crazy ideas... it's much, much more healthy than it was ten years ago, when it was a few large publishers controlling ten million dollar purse-strings," said Wright.

"I remember ten years ago at every E3 you'd walk around asking your friends 'What's new?...' 'nothing,nothing,nothing'.

"Now, every week somebody tells me about some weird little app that came out. Not big budget, but they're interesting and fun out of the box. It's a much more level playing field, I think," he said.

“They are putting marketing dollars behind these things, but still it's not five big publishers controlling ten titles a year."

Wright also believed that the next-gen consoles from Sony and Microsoft weren’t as exciting as what was happening in gaming's mobile realm.

"There will be some innovation there, but the mobile/tablet market feels like a wider frontier to me," he said.

"I think it's because you're not necessarily stuck in the living room; you're untethered. The world can become your playfield."

Wright also gave his opinion on this year’s SimCity launch disaster.

"That was basically inexcusable, that you charge somebody $60 for a game and they can't play it. I can understand the outrage,” he said.

“If I was a consumer buying the game and that happened to me, I'd feel the same."

Wright did feel bad for the team, however.

"I could have predicted – I kind of did predict there'd be a big backlash about the DRM stuff. It's a good game; I enjoy playing it a lot."