They all compete with each other since they're all competing for your time, there's just specializations that make them more attractive in certain situations. If I'm at home poking at a gem game at my phone, that's still taking up time that could be spent on a console. If I'm out and about, it's time that could be spent on a Switch or Steam Deck, or possibly cloud streaming.
There's plenty of overlap between all of them. Hell, most mobile games are mostly adaptions of what are usually called casual or what used to be called "desktop" games on PC. Genshin Impact is an open world RPG, there's CoD Mobile and Mario Kart too.
There's a habit to separate various kinds of media in it's own little lockboxes and it's completely wrongheaded and old fashioned in an age where tech is consolidating so rapidly.
> They all compete with each other since they're all competing for your time
But they have largely separate audiences. The number of people for whom they are in legitimate competition is vanishingly small compared to those who are exclusively on one side of the divide or the other.
Do they? Most people and households I know, particularly families, have products from all categories, with those who play games gravitating to dedicated hardware (mobile, console, PC etc) as opposed to phones and tablets.
Mobile, console, PC, handheld? Potato Potahto. I can play PC games on a handheld. I can play Xbox games on an iPhone. I can play Switch games on a PC. I can play "Mobile" games on a TV box.
The industry is so busy categorizing that they missed that everything runs on everything now.
My wife plays solitaire on her phone and never ever plays on my PS5.
I play games on my PS5 and never ever on my iPhone.
When my friends and I talk about what games we are playing no one, ever, has mentioned a mobile game. We did discuss Pokémon go, but not one of us actually installed it.
Software market segmentation was at one point borne entirely from technical considerations between different hardware platforms. Form factors, architecures, performance etc. To some extent it still is, but the differentiation has mostly dissolved down to screen size and the tradeoffs that need to be made to accommodate those differently sized screens.
The technical reasons for justifying segmented software markets have faded away. In spite of personal preference, your wife could play that exact same solitaire game on a PC or laptop if they wanted to, just like you could play PS5 games on your iPhone. Just like you should be able to play Xbox games on a PS5, or vice versa, with the only barrier existing to prevent this being the walls the platform holders themselves built. This absolutely results in market segmentation, but of the anti-competitive kind.
This will come to a head whenever AR glasses catch on proper, since that dissolves segmentation based on screen size. What's "mobile", when everything is mobile?
That's the market segmentation right there. My wife could play solitaire on her PC but she doesn't want to. She has her phone on her all the time. She is a very casual gamer. I, on the other hand, want to play games in surround sound with a large 4K TV. I have a switch but have never played it disconnected from the TV.
>What's "mobile", when everything is mobile?
The games. As as has been said on this thread, "mobile" games are actually either skinner boxes or casual games like solitaire. Console games are big investments in experiences - be the investment money, like GTA or Halo, or time and passion, like Celeste.
I hope that we will see some interesting games for VR/AR. So far there have been exactly zero high-investment games. Superhot, for example, was interesting, but played well without VR, and was short.
Here's the thing: I don't remember the last time I played a first person game other than Superhot. They aren't that fun. I don't have great proprioception in the real world, so how is that going to work in VR where I don't have legs? How will I time jumping off a building? How will I know when to strike? These are all reasons why most 3D games are third person. Games are fun.
Sure that's segmentation, but only because the platform holders architected it that way.
Solitaire is a mobile game? It didn't start out like that! Not just that it was for a long time a PC game, but also as a card game that required a big ass desk to play. Same with gambling games. You've been groomed into expecting that different hardware form factors require different software ecosystems, but that is a box that the industry has drawn for itself (with a few notable exceptions trying to break out of it).
As for the AR/VR talk, I was speaking more generally, not about AR/VR specific experiences. Given the panacea of AR glasses with perfect passthrough in a pair of Oakleys, virtual screens can be any shape or size. At which point the hardware distinction between "big screen" experiences like movies and GTA and smaller, casual games like solitaire are effectively at an even footing on the same device. At that point does it make sense to have separate stores for different hardware?
Not that I think it does today. If I purchase Solitaire, I should be able to play it anywhere on anything. If I purchase GTA, I should be able to play it anywhere on anything.
Music and some less demanding TV (reality shows, news) can be passive enough that you can consume it concurrently to video games or sport. Narrative TV and movies absolutely compete with time spent playing video games.
I don't think that the categorization is actually helpful, if anything it distorts reality by making it seem as if Microsoft are on the backfoot regarding gaming. Meanwhile, Sony is releasing games on Windows.
There's plenty of overlap between all of them. Hell, most mobile games are mostly adaptions of what are usually called casual or what used to be called "desktop" games on PC. Genshin Impact is an open world RPG, there's CoD Mobile and Mario Kart too.
There's a habit to separate various kinds of media in it's own little lockboxes and it's completely wrongheaded and old fashioned in an age where tech is consolidating so rapidly.