That's why we are getting Breath of Fire 6 as a crappy iOS game instead  of Breath of Fire 6 as a great  JRPG for the PS4 or Wii U.

I don't think that kind of abusive freemium model is at all sustainable. It killed Zynga, and it will kill anybody else who tries to pursue it. You can't prey on your customers like that and expect to survive.

What's that? And that shows that dedicated handhelds are indeed heading for rougher seas over the next 3-5 years? Why, yes indeed, I do think they are.
Been saying it all along, the 8th generation handhelds will be lucky to sell half as much as the PSP/DS when all is said and done.

Oh well it was good while it lasted but I think Ninty will do something amazing to survive all this.

See, that's the situation now. THere was an earlier time where 3-4x the people were doing the same. A lot of popular ones have lost fans, but there's still a bunch that spend hundreds and thousands every month.

Yet handheld console sales there are good, at least for Nintendo, so at this point it doesn't seem to be affecting that market. How long before this changes is anyone's guess. Maybe phones and handhelds can coexist.

As for Google and Apple this is excellent news.

Well, with the Vita being a non-factor and the DS managing three consecutive years of about 30 million sales, doesn't it mean something when the 3DS will likely peak between 16-18 million (about 13.9 million so far this year with four weeks left)? I think that the dedicated handheld market will be effectively halved this gen and we're already seeing it, the DS peak year was, as mentioned, somewhere between 29 and 31 million and the PSP peaked at about 14-15 million as far as I remember (which is right below the 3DS) wile the Vita will be lucky to sell more than 4 million in a single year at this point and the 3DS has averaged around 13-15 million per year so far with a likely peak well below 20 million.

The dedicated handheld market is taking a hit and it's not even hard to see. I'm talking global numbers now of course, but with Japan being the last bastion of dedicated handhelds, the change will all the more severe when it sets in fully, with the penchant for handheld gaming, they have all the more reason to embrace mobile/tablet gaming and with more intricate games arriving every year and hardware already being pretty good, it's fast becoming a real alternative to the dedicated handheld devices.

I think I've said that the combined handheld installed base this gen will half of the previous one or even less and I stand by that today.

I still have some hope that things will turn around one day for handhelds again. It would really be a shame to continue losing complete gaming experiences on handhelds to short mobile games and apps.

Gonna be an interesting 3 years coming up I think.