It's surprising to see so many people on HN of all places arguing that Sony is not competing with mobile. The previous poster used the term "disruption" for a reason - this is straight out of Innovator's Dilemma.
Sony and its advocates will argue that their focus is on serious/hardcore gamers, not casual/mobile gaming. Casual gamers don't pay premium prices and there may even be a smaller margin on mobile sales, such that it currently makes business sense to yield that market. But the PS is locked into long hardware development cycles and the platform needs to support games for years into the future, while mobile hardware is updated continuously such that the difference between the platforms will shrink - stealing away increasing numbers of consumers and development shops.
I think that we'll eventually reach the threshold where devices of all sizes have true "retina" quality screens, along with GPUs powerful enough to back them up, but that won't happen in the next generation of consoles, and even if it did, there is still one astronomical hurdle we have to jump in order to level the playing field.
Even at it's best, controlling a 3d game with a touch screen is a horrifyingly awful experience. It's so bad that I haven't made it out of the first level of any of the games I've tried. Not because I can't clear the content, but instead because doing so is such an awkward experience, that I'd rather go back to playing angry birds or read HN. As someone who spent his teen years playing GoldenEye, TF Classic, Q3A and Counter-Strike for 12-16 hours at a time, I find it quite an accomplishment when someone manages to make a FPS that I can't stand to play for more than 5 minutes.
I think that it's possible that we'll eventually have a level playing field on all platforms, but I don't think capacitive touch screens are going to be the innovation that makes it a reality.
I don't understand what you are saying. According to Apple's 2012 10K filing, both the iPhone and iPad lines independently, each year, net more than Sony's entire market cap.
How can there be any question of mobile game hardware surpassing hardcore gaming in profitability in the next console generation when it has already occurred?
If you're Activision or Blizzard, sure, the money is still in selling $60 titles. But in terms of hardware manufacturers like Sony and Microsoft, the ship has sailed.
It hasn't sailed. People are still buying those games; in fact those games are still breaking sales records. Casual games may become more popular, I don't know, but it's not zero-sum when the gaming market is growing overall.
You're comparing an insanely popular mobile phone and a general-purpose computing platform to an Xbox. While they are both mobile devices and both can play games, neither is really mobile gaming hardware per se. I mean, you're obviously not wrong that making the iPhone is good business, but iPhone owners are not primarily gamers -- not even casual ones -- so counting every iPhone sold as a "game hardware" sale at this point is pretty misleading.
Most importantly to the point at hand, there is no evidence that iPhone is stealing many sales from Xbox and PS3, nor that it will start in the foreseeable future. I very, very much doubt that many people find themselves wondering whether to get an iPhone or an Xbox to play games on.
Sony and its advocates will argue that their focus is on serious/hardcore gamers, not casual/mobile gaming. Casual gamers don't pay premium prices and there may even be a smaller margin on mobile sales, such that it currently makes business sense to yield that market. But the PS is locked into long hardware development cycles and the platform needs to support games for years into the future, while mobile hardware is updated continuously such that the difference between the platforms will shrink - stealing away increasing numbers of consumers and development shops.