A $150 mobile device is far from surpassing the Xbox 360 and PS3 in polygon pushing power. Ignoring that the hardware isn't going to be fast enough until Kal-El

A $150 mobile device is far from surpassing the Xbox 360 and PS3 in polygon pushing power. Ignoring that the hardware isn't going to be fast enough until Kal-El shows up (and even longer until Kal-El-type hardware is $150) the consoles also permit writing much closer to the metal than most mobile devices. Consistent hardware is the reason consoles have been so attractive to develop for -- you don't have to worry about leaving 30% of your market behind because you want to use OpenGL ES 2.0, you don't worry about having performance differences between different phones, you don't worry about one configuration having multiple cores and another not. Microsoft went so far to ensure consistency in their hardware performance profile that when the Xbox 360 was moved from discrete CPU/GPU to a SoC for their new slim version they built a front-side bus on die. Different hardware profiles is why AAA games just seemed to evaporate on the PC for a while. Even now with Direct3D 10 and 11 having given developers a much more stable target to aim for it's still a pain to develop for them. With the mobile market's mix of instruction sets (NEON, VFP, soft FP), graphics libraries (GLES 1.1, 2.0) and their different implementations (necessitating things like this: http://aras-p.info/blog/2010/09/29/glsl-optimizer/ http://aras-p.info/blog/2010/09/29/glsl-optimizer/), plus core counts, clock speeds, screen sizes, and operating systems, it's getting worse in mobile than it was for PC. For the most part console/PC games and mobile games are different in player usage too -- saying "why play a console game when you can boot your phone or browser for 5-10 minutes at a time" is like saying "why watch a movie when you can watch cat videos on Youtube". Different audience, different itches scratched. As for the "WebGL Rage" demo, it's neat but it's very misleading. First he's just displaying assets from the iOS version of Mutant Bash, it's not even the full Mutant Bash game, let alone the full game of Rage.