They're a growing threat, these simple games with their simple designs, simple controls, and simple graphics. They don't offer the full, premium adept that the real gamers want. They aren't hardcore enough. They aren't serious enough. They're just too... casual.



In the '90s these were all complaints used to express the strengthening console menace. Back then, a younger me squandered his meager income at the local Babbage's or web banking components Boutique, stores full of PC games in cardboard boxes -- console titles relegated to a few little shelves. It wouldn't take long for those consoles to take over those stores and, along the way, the entire industry. Between just 1998 and 2006 console system os sales more than doubled, from $2.5 billion to $6.7 billion, while PC game sales dropped from $1.8 billion to $970 million. Even the FPS, once exclusivism domain of the PC, is now a console enterprise, with Call of Duty: Black Ops launching on 4.9 million sales on the Xbox 360 and PS3. The PC version, meanwhile, sold less than 400,000 copies (the NPD lumped them in with sales of the playstation DS and Wii versions).



Who cares about ancient history? If you're a gamer you should, because it's episode again. This time, though, its console gamers lobbing the same lamentations at Angry Bird players, Words With Friends addicts, and ever-sneaky Fruit Ninjas. As smartphones and tablets get more powerful, the windows full access 100% uptime sla gaming machine looks more and more quaint. Where once system systems program supported implements in one big, happy family, it's all flattering rather more... disjointed. For a gamer like me, that's a little troubling. If app gaming does for consoles what those consoles did to the PC scene a decade ago, a lot of big game studios are going to be in trouble, and a lot of gamers are going to be pining for the good 'ol days.

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