Well, Inversion was kinda crap. Seriously, did you play it? One vaguely interesting mechanic does not make a game. I only got it because Best Buy had it as a daily deal for $20.
Here's the thing to understand about journalism and hardware development - journalists need stories, and hardware has a life cycle. These are obvious things to say, but they bear repeating because the end of a hardware life cycle is an opportunity for journalists to write about the end of that life cycle and speculate about what comes next.
And let's be blunt - it's speculation, no matter how many people think it's true (or false). It is an attempt to predict the future and it is impossible to predict the future. It is possible to look at the past and consider trends and their general direction to attempt to develop a better idea of what might happen, but that is still speculation. Nothing less, nothing more.
For a long time, I refused to play games on PC. Too many updates, too many shifting hardware requirements, etc. With a console, I bought it and it just worked. I didn't have to spend time finding drivers, updating them, changing config settings, etc.
And yet in the last year, I've contributed to a few PC-only games on Kickstarter. I bought Minecraft when it was in that weird pre-Alpha/Alpha stage where $20 got you lifetime updates. And I just bought Krater off Steam not too long ago.
My console gaming hasn't changed much either - I still play games on consoles much more than I do on PC.
I think part of what is going on is that journalists are seeing a casual gaming trend and confusing it with hardcore gamers. Likewise, I think journalists are seeing skyrocketing development costs and assuming that studios won't take risks like that and will instead stick with sequels to Triple A titles, or reduce development, and also seeing the lower cost of development for Android and iOS titles as a competitive factor.
So here's what we can sift out of all that:
1. Spending less money in development makes it easier for a good game to recoup expenses more quickly.
2. Development costs for mobile platforms are often less than for a console.
3. Since mobile platforms are trending right now, people trying to make a quick buck will throw some crap at that wall to see if it sticks.
This can look a lot like a seismic shift in development, but it really isn't. Major studios are attempting to find new monetization channels for their product - this is not new. That dates back to DLC. Micro-transactions are becoming a thing. This is newer, but still not really terribly new. A real money marketplace for online games has existed for some time - it's called eBay (and regardless of what TOS agreements say, you can often buy stuff there that isn't supposed to be for sale).
I don't fault developers for trying to find new revenue streams. For publicly traded companies, that's the job. It doesn't matter to an investor whether a game is good or bad, merely that the game is profitable, and preferably MASSIVELY profitable. For privately held developers, that's still at least part of the job, because if the game doesn't make money, you can't make payroll, much less more games.
Likewise, I don't fault journalists. They have to fill column inches, and speculation with some serviceable quotes can do that admirably, and spark discussion and debate and get page views (which, in turn, increases ad rates).
So let's recap: speculation about the future isn't news. Wired says consoles are dead. Well, consoles were dead as hell after the Odyssey 2 and Atari 2600 and Colecovision and Intellivision and ... you get the idea. That was in the late 1970s/early 1980s. And yet now Wired is debating whether the 360 and PS3 are dead, 30-some years later.
If we're going to look at the past to get an idea of the future, then I don't think Wired is looking far enough back, regardless of trends. Consoles have been dead before. They may be dead again. And yet the surest way to ensure that they remain relevant is doing exactly what Microsoft is doing and transforming the game console into something more like an entertainment set-top box with streaming video on demand, access to Hulu and Netflix, etc. It's showing people that what they thought was only a purpose-build box can actually be something more integral to their overall entertainment experience, and a handheld smart phone - despite its portability - is unlikely to do that.
Enough rambling. I think Wired is firing before it sees the target on this one.
