There seems to be a lot of people that don't mind parity, or even support it. Well, I would encourage them to look at the mobile market to see just how terrible parity is.

Mobile phones today are insanely powerful, there is no doubt. Both the Vita and the 3DS are complete garbage in the hardware department compared to newer phones like the Galaxy S5 and iPhone 5S, and yet phones have very few games that match up in visual quality to traditional handhelds. 

That's because game devs develop for the weakest hardware in order to save developmental costs while also providing the same game experience, whether you have a three year old phone or a brand new phone. This results in the vast majority of games not being close to their potential.

The same is happening in this generation, with developers increasingly favoring parity instead of optimising a game for the better platform. The biggest area of concern is PC, where games like Watch Dogs are intentionally gimped to provide the same gaming experience across all platforms, and to a lesser extent the PS4, which has versions of games like Destiny gimped due to weaker hardware.

This is a dangerous area of concern. I think not enough people realize just how bad this is for progress in the game industry.

The reason I'm using this example is because developers are afraid of developing a truly high-end mobile game, because it won't run on older devices. Due to this, even the high-end devices are stuck with mediocre games like Modern Combat 4 that could be so much more but were held back in order to be playble on everything.

I dont care but phone games are the worst hands down.

There are only VERY FEW and hard to find gems that are actually worthile and meaningful, others? please,.....

Though haveing one or 2 like that "all for money scumbugs" games as time wasters is fine lol. I have Samurai Seige which is a CoC type game and its bad, but the best of those type games!

Badlands is very indielike, and there was a game where you played as a Android....AMAZING.

See, the thing is about phones though, is people don't buy them for games. Games on them are just extras. I see a lot of posts how so many more people have phones but lets face it, only a fraction of those are people that actually go to play games on them regularily. People get phones for communication where as the handhelds are for gaming and if people want a handheld, they will probably look to the handhelds over the phones. This may change and it may inhibit the handhelds currently but I doubt phones will take over the handheld gaming sector in the near future.

You'd be surprised about just how much game revenue phones provide. Sure, people don't neccessarily buy  for games, but for most people the only gaming they do is on their phones.

I think your post, while meaning well is also disingenuous. This is cause of how much you seem to know about what you are saying and then the somewhat strange conclusion you arrived at.

Two things, first. No developer "gimps" a game for parity. Its kinda impossible to do when you think about it. Cause to accomplish it would mean that you would have to put in extra work to make the game run worse. This misconception is based off gullible people either believing what they see of games either in bullshots or extremely early in development footage or footage running off industrial grade hardware.

Secondly, this isn't all some sort of conspiracy. Its really straight forward. When a developer sets out to make a game, they always have a target in their head (this part you touched on and i agree with). If a deveoper is making a multiplatform game, then what they would do is simply try and optimize the game for weakest hardware. Simply cause if they get it running on the weakest hardware then everything else can run it.

What consoles represent to PCs is the minimum best standard, cause as console hardware become more similar to PCs, developers can just focus on the console knowing that PCs would be able to run them just fine. But no one sets out to gimp a game in the name of parity.

I always thought parity was an issue of content, and graphical quality. Mobile phone games are the type that don't need 10 different settings to play, and until a dedicated enthusiast market develops on mobile phones, it will remain the case. The mobile phone gaming audience is the same audience who played words with friends or farmville on facebook, it's just that smartphones are so young they haven't developed the enthusiast niche that PCs had. PC gaming is much more ancient and therefore developed all of the possible markets, and consequently one of those markets is the dedicated gamer. Another thing to consider is that mobile phones change almost every 6 months, like PCs, and therefore any reasonable sales will come from games that can perform on platforms bought years ago. With consoles this is not an issue, because they are closed platforms with no changes in specifications. PC has solved this by providing different setting options. Since mobile games are low-budget, there is no motivation to provide different graphical settings.

Compared to handheld consoles, yes. Octo-core vs quad core, 64 bit architecture, four-six times the memory, much better dedicated graphics, etc.

There's no way to remedy this because sales of a game on one platform will be greatly affected by people thinking the experience is too different.

The Wii U isn't all that weaker than other 8th Gen consoles and 3rd party sales are still cannibalized by differing experiences. Widening that gap will affect sales for every console.

The answer would be to have more exclusive games on each system to push hardware but that also has problems. People only like exclusives when it's on the console they own and companies like widening the install base.

Watch Dogs for PC was very much gimped. Modders even found the original graphics in the game files, and found that the game not only looked better but even ran better with those.

Also, Destiny is being gimped on the PS4 due to Bungie wanting the same experience across all platforms, including last-gen. It could easily his 60fps, but is locked to 30.

I get what you are saying but the thing with the mobile market is that most of the games are basically, try to make the most amount of money with the least development costs as possible... I mean, Mobile market has some high quality games that really push and show what can be done with mobile gaming but those games usually don't sell as well as they should. Infact, the games that make the most amount of money are shitty free-2-play games like Flabby Bird and other terrible games that seem to make 50k per day

So while I get what you are trying to say with parity and mobile market, I do think the reason why is more to do with, "hey look at these free, shitty games making more money than the games where the developers actually put some effort into them" rather than parity. Oh and also Developer Lazyness

With that being said, I do think there is some backhanding and lazyness going on in the console Gaming scene when it comes to parity however, so I do still worry but I don't think mobile is the best example