Topic: Are Mobiles really the future towards gaming? Can we still expect to see the market for consoles?

With the world going over mobile, its very easy to get games in mobile compared to how you'd get them for Consoles.

While third parties are important for various reasons, majority of them are moving over to mobile. Now obviously, this move is done to please the shareholders and to get free money really fast which is why I feel its not really a game changing thing. Because other than actual game devs that do make great games on it, the problem is that the players have to search very hard to get what they would like to play on their phones.

Competition is way harsh compared to consoles because even with Sony's Vita and Nintendo's Wii U selling not so well, they do make some profit because there is an actual market for them. Anybody who plays Angry Birds on phones isn't going to play another app that plays like it. Crush the Castle actually came before Angry Birds and yet the latter succeeded.

Atleast one positive thing that I can think of is that its very easy to distribute your game on the phones simply because of the way they were made unlike in consoles where developers need to work hard to make quality games.......

Speaking of which, how often do you see quality games that work well and that actually make sense for what ever it does for marketing? Very little in my experience.

Look, I know topics are already picked up about this somewhere but seeing as though its becoming very serious like SEGA losing profit and such, it makes you wonder......does it do any good or not?

Consoles for now do not need to worry about mobile at all...In the future maybe if apple/google/Samsung etc. find better and cheaper ways to have a phone powerful with a large batter in a small amount of space but for now and for the foreseeable future no.

And I know someone will bring up a "Mobile game market crash" That will not happen the reason the gaming industry crashed the first time was people were fed up buying crappy games for too much money but now most mobile games are free to some extent regardless if they are crappy or not, and with the internet now being a factor most bad mobile games will be covered with the newest Big mobile games like angry birds or flappy bird or subway surfer...ect.

It's been awhile, hasn't it Artwark

Mobile is not a video game paradise. It just has a lot of games that play on a phone. Do you still want to go to paradise?

No, I think consoles are here to stay for a good while, and are still the best way to play games.

For the record, I wouldn't worry about a "phone" dominated gaming market, either. Everyone who seems to be worried about this seems to forget tablets exist as well, and I'd assume most people doing any "serious" gaming on mobile, is doing it on a tablet, due to the larger real estate (making it less likely your fingers will get in the way).

Furthermore, if there ever was a huge push to make mobile the dominant method of gaming (especially since streaming to TVs is becoming easier), I'd imagine it'd be because Apple and/or Google had released an official gamepad for use on their devices, fixing the biggest barrier to mobile gaming (and I'm sure any developer making a more core experience would utilize it, knowing the target audience).

When I say mobile gaming, I include tablets.

Not by a long shot. Developers make mobile games because it's easy, not because it's a recommendable market. That's because phones are inherently useless as actual gaming devices. Several genres are simply impossible on these things, the general audience has the attention span of a dried cucumber, and the sheer lack of space due to the inability of increasingly many phones to allow SD Cards all make mobile gaming a gimmick, not more, not less. It all builds up on the same thing the devices themselves are out for: making as much money as possible with the lowest common denominator (+/-1%) of actual quality.

As long as video game consoles keep selling, new video game consoles will keep getting released.

Mobile gaming is low hanging fruit for developers. Get rich quick schemes that usually don't pan out. If they do it's in spurts. A good chunk are forgettable. I feel Mobile gaming is here to stay for the market that's got too short of an attention span or no time whatsoever to dedicate to console gaming.

In Japan, mobile gaming is eating into the home console market in a pretty fundamental way; the era of twenty (and a half) million PlayStation 2 in one country, let alone ten million PlayStation 3, is all but over.

That is why we see barely over ten thousand units a week every week in Japan nowadays, because people prefer to play their mobile games on the move, or during their daily commute. I work in London sometimes and LOTS of people use their phones to play a quick fix game for the duration of the train journey.

Having said this, mobile game are good and bad; I have played some genuinely unique mobile games that I had not played anywhere else such as Plants vs. Zombies when it first came out (touch screen controls is better for this kind of game) as well as the likes of Year Walk, Tiny Wings, Threes, Ridiculous Fishing, Prune, OLO, Monument Valley, Little Inferno, Groove Coaster, Dots, Device 6 and even the (once) popular phenomenon, Angry Birds.

So yeah, mobile games have their place, but it can be difficult/frustrating rummaging through the rubbish to find the good (quality) games.

There will still be a console market, simply because some people will always prefer playing games with actual buttons and physical controls. Smartphones and their touch screen controls aren't right for all genres.

And if Nintendo keeps making consoles and not releasing their biggest games on phones, then the market will still exist, because it'll only be possible to play the likes of Super Smash Bros on a dedicated console.

Mobile is selling, but the key is that consoles are also still selling. So... no problem, yet.

As others have said, many people still enjoy the physical button pressing of home consoles/handhelds. Personally, I know I can get stuff like FF on my tablet/smart phone (and I've tried playing them), but I just don't get the same connection and feeling as I get when I play the very same games on a traditional handheld or console, even if it means a more expensive purchase.

And, as others have said, "larger" AAA games are still pretty much exclusive to console. Theoretically, tablet/smart phone games can be as expansive as they want, but they are limited to the smaller hard drives/slower chips in those devices. I think most average smart phones can hold... 16 gigs of data? Without spending quite a bit more to upgrade. So when you look at your typical Xbox One game that requires about 40 gigs... you begin to see there are some strict limitations the mobile market needs to heed for the foreseeable future. So as long as that's true, the "premium" experiences will still only be had on console.

Well... let's see if history can give us the answer. After all what you're suggesting is that consoles would end up like arcades so..
Why did the arcades die?
1. Consoles were more convenient.
2. Console horsepower grew to the capacity of rivaling arcades.
3. Arcade games were being ported by the truckload to console
Any similarities to now?
1. Mobile is more convenient than console.
2. Mobile ports are happening for numerous games.
3. Although mobile isn't as powerful as console and PC, mobile is getting there (and arguably, mobile was almost there before PS4 and XBOX ONE came out).
So if consoles died, and mobile became the driving force in this industry, I wouldn't be TOO suprised.

@CM30: Just like there are still arcades. Almost no one plays in arcades anymore, but they still exist. Also, why not companies just make bluetooth controllers for their mobile games? In that case, games like Super Smash Bros., Batman: Arkham Asylum, Call of Duty, Metal Gear Solid, Shadow of the Colossus, Street Fighter 5, Spec Ops: The Line, The Last of Us, Halo, Dark Souls, and all of the other AAA titles we know and love.

As with most things it's more complicated than that. Going through these three points I'd argue that:

1. Yes, mobile is more convenient for particular types of content. However if you want to go into deeper kinds of content? Platformers, shooters, fighting games, games that require precise controls? Pretty much every main genre that has made AAA gaming big? Sure people already have the mobile device but that mobile device isn't great for those styles of games. And you'd argue that "hey, they can just use a bluetooth controller"... but now you're also carrying around a bluetooth controller. Which makes it even LESS convenient.

2. We're far from mobile being powerful enough to rival the console experience. And anyway, controls are just as big a barrier. When people talk about mobile taking over the console space generally they talk about mobile also taking the same form as consoles. At which point I'd argue that it's not "mobile taking over" at all.

3. Devs are making games on mobile, they aren't really making the same games though. The popular games on mobile are mostly stuff that wouldn't at all do well on consoles. The reverse is also true. They're entirely different markets.

To answer this question, I will believe anything is possible. Arcades fall to consoles, the Gameboy doing well despite being monochrome, the PS2 despite being basically a disk based N64 outselling everything. The 3DS making a turnaround. I will believe it if it happens.

Hell in the UK the Dreamcast is seemingly outselling the Wii U. Work that one out.

I fully expect Sony and MS to go the services route with PlayStation and Xbox in the next 5-8 years. Whether that means a more mobile direction, who knows, but I do think the future for 'traditional' consoles is pretty dim.

@Cyber-BLP--:
1. Anything COULD happen.
2. PS2 was more than a disk-based N64. It could play movies. There was a linux installation disk. There was a full body motion controller called the PS2 eyetoy. It had a headset. It had external storage. It had a DVD remote control. It had online play. Did N64 have any of that?
3. The DreamCast outsold Wii U in the U.S. too.

@MrMario02: Dreamcast has outsold the Wii U worldwide, I'm talking in recent sales, people here in the UK are going out and buying Dreamcasts for Shenmue.