I don't think that's a joke at all - my kids started playing around age of 3 on PC, and no matter all the consoles and tablets in our house, they still prefer PC (currently they are 6 and 8).

And it has a lot facts backing it sorry. I play video games but as a down time or relaxation at night. When the sun is out, im outside.  I am 37 and got my first console( Sega Master System) when i was 9. We only had one T.V. so that is where it was hooked up. So I can only play when my parents were not watching something, but i also told to go out side and my parents would turn it off and tell me to go outside , if i was playing to much.

Parents now are super over protected, about everything that can happen to their child they do not care if they stay indoors so now they have created health issues for their child. Obeseity is up a lot in the U.S. over the past 30 years in children, and when did the home console boom start. think about it. 

While this rise in mobile gaming is a star reason why Nintendo is looking at the mobile scene with interest, I can't help but feel that this will come back and bite the whole industry in the butt later on. Think about it, we have generations of kids coming up that embrace the F2P model and just mess around with cheap tablets and phones. At that point, Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo would be hard pressed to sell their consoles to that audience (at least without making some big compromises).

ugh mobile gaming is a cancer... boring games, no tactile controls. how did this happen?

ooohh noooo...

This will also affect digital vs physical.. I had a nephew saying: can't you just download the game on the system? They are growing up never to have to blow a cartridge or wiping a dvd/bluray clean..

None of this information is surprising at all. A lack of exposure and interest in larger scale titles are also a big factor.

What I want to know is how many of those kids are allowed to make micro-transaction purchases? Especially the really young ones. Because if parents are not allowing them to do so, than the irony is that these kids are being drawn to mobile gaming while simultaneously immunized against the dominant business practices of the mobile model, learning to either grind past the micro-transaction gates or move on to another free game. Time will tell I suppose. As for mobile whipping out PC and consoles, I doubt that will ever happen. The market for them may be bigger, but that does not simultaneously mean that the other market gets destroyed. Families that have never gamed before are now gaming on their phones. They are not nor were they ever going to buy their kids consoles. Which raises the question of how reliable these surveys are for gauging the shrinkage of the console and pc space since as the mobile market grows so too does the pool they can do the survey on, thus increasing the odds of more mobile-only new-to-gaming people being selected over long standing gamers and their families, meaning the odds grow that the resulting "decrease" is actually just the survey covering the former group and not showing where a percentage of the latter group has made a switch from traditional to mobile.

Mobile phones and to a lesser extent, tablets are ubiquitous.

Tablets will only replace more traditional computers over time as their utility continues to improve.

If you have two devices on your person most of the time, it's not much of a stretch to use them as one's go to for entertainment like games.

I've all but stopped playing games on my iPad and even my iPhone after about 7 years over multiple devices, but I don't really represent the general public and I definitely don't represent the newest generation that is being reared in a world where tablets and smartphones are ubiquitous.

It's all about perception. This kid sees this kid who sees this kid etc. With MY kid? I started her out on NES games. By the time she was 3, she was beating SMB. When she was 5, she was playing Super Meat Boy. I decided a long time ago that if she showed interest in games, that I was going to start her out on real gaming... not just on things like Uncharted where there's really no consequnces... but REAL twitch based, hard as nail stuff. That's how I grew up in the 80's. All we had were NES games and it made me a much better gamer because of thier difficulty and the whole challenge/reward factor.

Because of all that, she appreciates and loves consoles. She uses her ipad and ipod and does those little crappy time waster games, but when she gets a new game for Xbox or Wii-U? She's PUMPED. So, yeah, what you said IS actually possible. But the problem is, how many parents are like me? Not many. Most don't give a shit about their kids lives enough to invest their own time with them... sadly.