Mobile gaming is more important than PlayStation 4 and Xbox One

More important in what sense?
This is really a hard comparison that can be argued in so many ways.

To me this is like saying that a shitty TATA is more important than an F1 car, isn't it?
If we take the F1 cars out of our lives, car tech and culture would start to plummet.

So if all the companies launched 10x more mobile games than PS4 games, then in just a year's time we'd be flooded with so many mobile games that at some point we'd just not want anything to do with it. Might even be a good argument for quality over quantity?

But if history is anything to go by, the masses care little for quality anyway..

The main image that I'm struggling with is to imagine getting pizza and beer for a night off, and powering up some mobile game till the late hours into the night. :P
 
Of course there are more developers for mobile than for consoles. It makes sense. See, anyone can make games for the mobile platform. There's no quality check. Hell, you can take an example project and release it as a game on mobile. It's been done multiple times before.

On PC it gets a bit more difficult. If you want your game to be sold then you want it to be sold on a platform like Steam etc and there's a little bit more quality control.

On console it's exceptionally difficult to release a game. The quality control for consoles are crazy tough. The licenses aren't easy to get without prior released games, or a good game that's console ready.

So of course most developers will target mobile. It's the easiest to develop for. Is it more important? Hell, no. It's as if the person who created that chart does not know what the word means.
 
Bunch of comments so far, so let me take a stab at why this chart says what it says...

Currently, there are about 40 million PS4 sold, and by lack of proper numbers from Microsoft, one can speculate that there are about 20 million Xbox One's in the wild. Speculation also points to over 125 million users on Steam, so it's safe to say that the PC gaming market is close to 150 million or a bit more.

Even if you put all of these platforms together for a total gaming market of approximately 210 million players, it is nothing even close to the Android and iPhone users, with 1.4 billion Android and 505 million iPhone users. This is a mobile market of almost 2 billion, or about a quarter of all the people on the planet. Just by sheer volume of the market it is easy to say that mobile gaming is much more "important" than any of the more traditional platform market.

But what does this "important" mean exactly. Well, as far as what I would guess, it is the strategic importance to the business of the developers. Mobile is more important than any other platforms for various reason from a business strategy position.

Firstly, as I've already shown, there are an insane amount more users of mobile platforms. This market is also growing at phenomenal rates, and more and more money will be generated from this incredible vast amounts of people

Secondly, micro-transactions makes for a highly lucrative income stream, as the involvement psychology of paying small amounts for in-game items is much easier for consumers to justify than spending a big amount upfront for a game. More people will justify paying a small $1 amount per item as spending $60 upfront. This is evident in the research most people do before buying a new game, where paying for micro-transactions have a very low involvement.

Thirdly, overheads and production costs are much, much lower in creating mobile games than traditional games. This means that margins will be much higher in mobile gaming than other platforms.

Fourthly, expected growth in the mobile gaming industry is excepted to grow year on year for the next foreseeable future. People all have phones, and even though it will never become the main gaming platform, it will be a secondary gaming platform for billions of people around the world

All these points can further be the reasons why the biggest gaming companies in the world at the moment are all focused on mobile gaming. It makes so much business sense that mobile gaming is more important than any other platform.

Also, remember, just because you may not play games on your cell phone does not mean its not a viable gaming platform. The fact of the matter is that even if only 1% of all cell phone users play games on their cell phones, the market would still be almost as big as the Xbox One platform, and lets be honest, we know that there is much more than 1% of cell phone users that play games on their phones. And the more games people play, the more likely it is that they will pay for micro-transactions. Also, remember that the youth of today will be the working, income earning adults of tomorrow. And children love playing games on cell phones. Now imagine if this generation grows up with their own income, the mobile market will explode.

Now is the perfect time for game developers to get into mobile gaming, and now if the perfect time for them to make mobile gaming more important than other platforms.
 
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