I strongly disagree, mobile and console/PC gaming are not competing. It’s a completely different audience, different games and so on. I’d consider them mostly separate markets. The Switch tried to bridge the gap but really didn’t.
What would the Switch have needed to accomplish to bridge the gap to mobile? Sell 1 billion units?
People usually have the latest Play Station or Xbox, not both, but lots of people have a Switch in addition to either.
I think it's a bit silly to suggest that there isnt a decent overlap in the market. Any Japanese company has a mobile division, and they all utilize their console IP's there. They wouldn't do that if all their audience were candy crush players.
Try to sell mobile games to "console/pc gamers", you just don't sell them, different market.
From a personal perspective, all my friends who play videogames avoid mobile like plague.
These were a bunch of weebs who also played stuff like Final Fantasy 14. And many mobile games marketed towards those current/former RPG players are similar in all but raw technical scope (and even then, we have Genshin impact now. That gap is closing). But sure, if your friend group focuses on FPS or fighters I can see a lack of interest.
No one has tried to really make a 3d platformer mobile game, though. I wonder how much of that is due to technical/logistical issues and how much due to lack of audience demand. There are some 2D platformers, so that's not the issue.
There's plenty of overlap between all of them. Hell, most mobile games are mostly adaptions of what are usually called casual or what used to be called "desktop" games on PC. Genshin Impact is an open world RPG, there's CoD Mobile and Mario Kart too.
There's a habit to separate various kinds of media in it's own little lockboxes and it's completely wrongheaded and old fashioned in an age where tech is consolidating so rapidly.
But they have largely separate audiences. The number of people for whom they are in legitimate competition is vanishingly small compared to those who are exclusively on one side of the divide or the other.
Mobile, console, PC, handheld? Potato Potahto. I can play PC games on a handheld. I can play Xbox games on an iPhone. I can play Switch games on a PC. I can play "Mobile" games on a TV box.
The industry is so busy categorizing that they missed that everything runs on everything now.
But if you define the market that way, it probably also includes books, movies, television, and sports. Not so useful when working on antitrust.
I don't think that the categorization is actually helpful, if anything it distorts reality by making it seem as if Microsoft are on the backfoot regarding gaming. Meanwhile, Sony is releasing games on Windows.
I play games on my PS5 and never ever on my iPhone.
When my friends and I talk about what games we are playing no one, ever, has mentioned a mobile game. We did discuss Pokémon go, but not one of us actually installed it.
The technical reasons for justifying segmented software markets have faded away. In spite of personal preference, your wife could play that exact same solitaire game on a PC or laptop if they wanted to, just like you could play PS5 games on your iPhone. Just like you should be able to play Xbox games on a PS5, or vice versa, with the only barrier existing to prevent this being the walls the platform holders themselves built. This absolutely results in market segmentation, but of the anti-competitive kind.
This will come to a head whenever AR glasses catch on proper, since that dissolves segmentation based on screen size. What's "mobile", when everything is mobile?
That's the market segmentation right there. My wife could play solitaire on her PC but she doesn't want to. She has her phone on her all the time. She is a very casual gamer. I, on the other hand, want to play games in surround sound with a large 4K TV. I have a switch but have never played it disconnected from the TV.
>What's "mobile", when everything is mobile?
The games. As as has been said on this thread, "mobile" games are actually either skinner boxes or casual games like solitaire. Console games are big investments in experiences - be the investment money, like GTA or Halo, or time and passion, like Celeste.
I hope that we will see some interesting games for VR/AR. So far there have been exactly zero high-investment games. Superhot, for example, was interesting, but played well without VR, and was short.
Here's the thing: I don't remember the last time I played a first person game other than Superhot. They aren't that fun. I don't have great proprioception in the real world, so how is that going to work in VR where I don't have legs? How will I time jumping off a building? How will I know when to strike? These are all reasons why most 3D games are third person. Games are fun.
Solitaire is a mobile game? It didn't start out like that! Not just that it was for a long time a PC game, but also as a card game that required a big ass desk to play. Same with gambling games. You've been groomed into expecting that different hardware form factors require different software ecosystems, but that is a box that the industry has drawn for itself (with a few notable exceptions trying to break out of it).
As for the AR/VR talk, I was speaking more generally, not about AR/VR specific experiences. Given the panacea of AR glasses with perfect passthrough in a pair of Oakleys, virtual screens can be any shape or size. At which point the hardware distinction between "big screen" experiences like movies and GTA and smaller, casual games like solitaire are effectively at an even footing on the same device. At that point does it make sense to have separate stores for different hardware?
Not that I think it does today. If I purchase Solitaire, I should be able to play it anywhere on anything. If I purchase GTA, I should be able to play it anywhere on anything.