>No gamer worth his salt will be satisfied with poor touchscreen controls with an internal compass and accelerometer. I am making a distinction between mobile

>No gamer worth his salt will be satisfied with poor touchscreen controls with an internal compass and accelerometer. I am making a distinction between mobile consoles (e.g. PSP, DS, Gameboy) and home consoles like the Xbox, PS3 and Wii. I think the latter group is safe, for now. There are very good reasons to have home consoles, in addition to tablets and smartphones. It's the former that's under threat. Anecdotally, I've seen what friends' and coworkers' kids (ages: 5-14) get excited about. We've talked about how they seem to be content with the current game library on the app stores and don't really care about mobile consoles. Furthermore, I've seen more kids playing on a smart phone, or a tablet, next to their moms out in public, than I've seen them play on a DS or equivalent. This is bad news for Nintendo. Again, it isn't necessary for mobile devices to take the entire market, if they take a chunk, it hurts Nintendo incredibly. The hardcore mobile console gamer market, isn't nearly as big as you think it is. Certainly not big enough to sustain the entire industry. Finally, smartphones and tablets are only going to get more ubiquitous and they are going to get even better, making it that much harder to justify spending extra money on a mobile console and that much harder to justify lugging yet another devices around (in addition to your smartphone and tablet). >No one buys a Smartphone / Tablet to game. No one goes out and seeks the iPad for the perfect "Angry Birds" experience. No they don't. They pick-up smartphones and tablets for multitude of other reasons and get a gaming platform for free. This has the effect of expanding the gaming market by turning people who would never have purchased a mobile consoles into mobile gamers (e.g. me), but more importantly I believe it also cannibalizes existing market in that there is a segment of population that would ordinarily buy a mobile console, now will not as they are content with the game selection on their tablet/smart phone. >But go back to the early 2000s, and lets see you argue that the cell phones should be included in the market share of "handheld consoles". I wouldn't do that because realistically they didn't impact sales of mobile consoles, unlike modern smartphones and tablets. They were also under-powered, clumsy devices with a tiny low resolution screen and no easy way of loading any programs onto them, again, completely unlike modern smartphones and tablets.