I don't think so to be honest. PlayStation has home entertainment on lock with little competition and Nintendo has handheld on lock with little competition. Both companies can thrive this way and Microsoft will become more service based with Xbox. There is a slot for all 3 in the industry without having to step on each others toes and I think they are all starting to realise that.

Maybe direct competition for Switch will come via streaming service/devices?
A streaming device can do the same things a Switch does today, playing games everywhere, anytime.

Rumors says Sony and Microsoft will launch a streaming device along with Ps5 and Xbox4 and so Google with their Project-Stream that will be unveiled at GDC on March, 19.
All those 3 companies are about to share the gaming market from 2020/2021 offering the same games and similar services. Nintendo could do the same by producing a Switch Stream device that will release side by side with the next Switch 2 (this type of service already tested in Japan for games such as Resident Evil 7).

Basically, in the next gen we will have all the games on all formats (Nintendo console included), except for exclusive games, naturally.

Exactly

Hey, don't ignore my reply or you do it on purpose?

1. You are only counting rich countries there. In those countries, you're right, that shouldn't be a problem, except maybe some rare cases. However, countries outside of the top 20-30 richest countries do have less developed infrastructure, and thus much worse conditions for game streaming, both due to data limitations, but also ping.

2. Yeah, yeah, I could see that myself with Playstation Now - not. Under 8Mbps the visual quality was more at PSP level. Thankfully, I had 30Mbit which made PS3 games at least look like PS3 games, but with the 8Mbps at my dad's place it took a very serious visual hit, and that just wasn't worth it for me. Also, keep in mind that the 5mbps (which in Sony's own terms need to be rock-solid and rather suggest up to 12mbps to make sure) and 3GB/h Sony publicized for Playstation Now is just enough for 720p30. 1080p is twice as big as 720p,which means 1080p60 would at least need 4 times as much bandwith and data so 20mbps and 12GB/h for 1080p60

3. Prices will get cheaper, but certainly not as fast as you seem to think. It took forever to get high data cap plans with LTE and these are unpayable as you can see yourself.

I also checked what the prices would be in Germany (Telekom), Luxembourg (Tango), France (Orange) and found that they are wildly different. Telekom has an unlimited Data subscription plan... but that's needed since the next-lower one only gives 10GB. Tango doesn't have any unlimited data plan and even their biggest one is capped at 44GB (free wifi is relatively commonplace in the city of Luxembourg, but if you live in outside the city, you're pretty much out of luck here). Orange is pretty good and cheap, but not unlimited. Just to show you that plans like the ones you posted are not universal in the industrial world.

False.
The resolution... As in rendering output resolution doesn't increase or decrease game sizes one single piece. It's an arbitrary setting... It's everything else like textures and audio that blow out game sizes, not the resolution itself.

Streaming wise... A Higher Resolution stream can be smaller in size than a lower resolution stream... Bitrates are a thing... I.E. You can have a higher bitrate, lower resolution stream.
Plus encoding method. h.265 is extremely efficient... More so than older methods.

@bolded: But that's just locally. You don't stream textures after all, you stream images. And in that regard, the bigger the image the more data it consumes per unit of time.

I know HEVC (h.265 for those who don't know what it is) is efficient. But is used for streaming by Sony? I don't expect Sony to output native h.265, especially not considering the age of the service (if it would use Playstation Now). MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) or even VP9 is much more likely there.

Also, as far as I know HEVC is pretty heavy on the hardware in higher resolutions. Full HD should be fine with mobile hardware, bit it took an Ivy Bridge i7 running at full speed to get 29fps in 4K resolution in 2014. That being said, I think for a handheld 1080p would suffice, but if you want to stream to an UHD TV this might become a limitation - although modern chips have hardware decoders for HVEC, so that problem may be gone by now.

Also, looking at the open-souce, royalty-free successor of VP9, AV1, my 20mbit expectation for 1080p60fps seems largely correct here (level 4.1).

1. It could be better but it's not so kind of a moot point.

2. ~2gb/hr for a passable experience. So if someone plays for 2hrs/day on average that's 120gb a month for a passable (not great) experience. You just said that Verizon/Sprint offer 75-100gb unthrottled so before factoring in other things that use data, people will go over their limit every month?

Indeed. Hence why I made the two separate points.

The Playstation 4 has native support for HEVC/H.265 in hardware, hence why Netflix is able to use it.
It doesn't need to rely heavily on the CPU.

Either way, resolution is only part of the equation is what I am trying to convey.

I was originally hoping that H.266 would be ready for prime time for next-gen consoles, but it doesn't look like it at this stage.. That would have brought with it 50% improvements (Or so they say.) in compression efficiency.

AV1 might gain traction as well, who knows? That has an edge of H.265 and VP9 too.

Either way, 8k is coming whether we like it or not.

Isn't Microsoft making a handheld? Hey really should. I'd love to play Halo on the go.