Chaos Rings got well rated because it is one of the best game on smartphone, but he is not rated on the same scale than videogames on consoles. If that game had released on PSP, he would have got a 6/10 most likely. So you can say that it is a "AAA" title for smartphone, but a medium sized RPG game for console.

Oh my goodness, I think he just lives in a bubble :S

Well that has more to do with rising development cost of HD consoles. Not handhelds. Japanese publisher are pretty much the only ones doing profit and guess what they make a lot of handheld games. It kinda puzzles me how western developers ignored DS and its massive userbase. It looks like 3DS will share the same fate.

Lets see. 5 years ago, the best of the best mobile games probably had total profits of 300k.

Nowadays one of the bigger mobile games had revenue equivalent to a handheld game selling 500k but profits equivalent to a third party handheld selling 1million which recently has become far more uncommon then you seem to realize.

And this isn't even the biggest game. There are a few massive free to play and dollar games that are probably approaching if not exceeding 100mil in revenue and are more profitable than basically any recent handheld game without monster hunter or mario in the name.

The truth is the mobile market is accelerating at a MUCH MUCH faster pace than the handheld market. The only handheld games left that can exceed the bigger hits of the fairly new handheld market are mario and monster hunter. Remember nintendo giving out 1million free copies of zelda and nintendogs doesn't help them profit.

Big third companies are already porting a bunch of formerly handheld games to mobile devices. The line is rapidaly blurring to differentiate the devices. Big nintendo games will continue making more money than any mobile game for a while, but for third parties who not only need to pay shipping, packaging fees, and have retailers take a cut, also have nintendo taking a cut, mobile gaming is becoming a much more popular platform. Because selling 1million copies of a game at full price on a handheld is becoming very difficult.

Keep in mind that infinity blade was made by a studio of 10-19 workers (according to wikipedia) in 6 month (http://www.computerandvideogames.com/331260/infinity-blade-franchise-grosses-30-million-in-1-year/), this compared to most consoles of 50+ employee and 2+ years of dev time.

"Now, publisher Epic Games also reveals that the game has already turned a profit within its first week."

http://www.forbes.com/sites/oliverchiang/2010/12/17/fastest-grossing-iphone-app-was-profitable-within-its-first-week/

As you can see (for those doubting how much profit was made, the first week revenue is 1.8 million and already profitable, infinity blade 1 most like made around 18 million in PROFIT!

As of last year the average return on iOS games was $700 gross. That may have improved a bit since then, but that's not really painting a pretty picture, especially when you keep in mind that average includes the anomaly that is the headline grabbing Angry Birds, which last I saw had just about made $100million in revenue, but we don't know exactly what their costs are to give profit. Logically the costs won't be that high though.

However, I'd imagine the average return on handheld games is a bit more than $700. Taking Nintendo, seeing as they are the kings of the arena thus making them the fair comparison to the kings of iOS, NSMB would have given them many multiple times the amount Rovio earned from Angry Birds for just a fraction of the sales. And then they had Mario Kart, Pokemon, etc doing it as well.

Do their costs for those specific games really scale up that much to make up for the massive difference in return there? I doubt it.