Horace Dediu gets to heart of the gaming device issue:
That is where mobile is the clear winner. More people will hire mobile devices for their primary gaming activity. And as mobile devices get inexorably better, they will be hired for use in the setting where consoles have been king: the living room.
Whether dedicated gaming machines are better for gaming is moot. There just may not be enough hardcore gamers to support the industry. Smartphones are nearly universal (in the markets that would matter to game companies, at any rate) so devices that can play games are already ubiquitous. Since a smartphone comes with gaming capabilities “for free,” more and more people are forgoing the dedicated device, as Dediu’s charts demonstrate.