The DeanBeat: A microcosm of mobile games reveals the coming death of the consoles

On my recent Labor Day holiday weekend, my extended family gathered for a vacation on the beach. It was a moment for me to look into the consumer petri dish and think about the state of modern gaming. At any given moment, parents were yelling at their kids to get off their mobile devices. The kids didn’t listen and had their heads buried in their smartphones at every chance. We didn’t have game consoles at the vacation house, and nobody missed them.

My nephews were laughing at my moribund Clash of Clans base. They took pity on me and offered to redesign it so it would withstand attacks better. Meanwhile, I was fascinated with Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, as I finally started playing Blizzard Entertainment’s addictive fantasy card game on an iPad. My kids were playing Let It Goat, the Flappy Bird clone from SkyVu, as well as Swing Copter, the impossibly difficult game from Flappy Bird creator Dong Nguyen.

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Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.