Yeah, we'll have to buy expensive smartphones that become obsolete every year or so instead!
The future indeed.
Except you don't have to do that.
An iPhone 4 or 4s can still run most of the games on the App Store, as can an iPad 2. Sure, the latest iPhones and iPads can run these games at higher resolutions with better graphics, but the old devices are still pretty damn good.
Things are pretty similar on the Android side, too. No game has come close to pushing my Nexus 4, which has relatively weak hardware compared to the monster SoCs like the Snapdragon 800. The Nexus 10 and 2012 Nexus 7 can run games well, too.
I imagine the smartphones and tablets being released today will be able to handle games for the next 2-3 years at the very least.
That's old news, signs in recent times are that the mobile market has become crazy over-saturated and trying to make the new mobile hit is like trying to make a MMORPG to compete with World of Warcraft. Bad news are starting to appear on the mobile gaming front:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/203761/The_Puzzle__Dragons_train_is_finally_slowing_down.php
http://www.totaltele.com/view.aspx?C=1&ID=484278
Those articles say that 'Puzzles & Dragons' revenue is slowing down, not mobile revenue as a whole.
And you don't need to have a Puzzles & Dragons-esque hit to be successful on mobile. Far from it. Just like you don't need to hit GTA5 or Halo whatever numbers to be successful on consoles. There's tens (hundreds?) of thousands of developers you've probably never heard of doing really well on mobile. Perfect example is my brother's company. They're a 6 man team generating around $60k~ of profit each month. They're launching their third game this month and the initial results are looking promising. They're never going to hit the highs that games like Puzzles & Dragons and Clash of Clans will, but they're still going to make enough money to live very comfortably for the rest of their lives.
Edit - I don't see what that second article has to do with anything. It's about the decline of 'gaming focused websites' and the rise of smartphone apps. It's saying that the 'gaming focused website' market is being taken over by smartphone apps, which shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
To quote --
'But now Japan's mobile-phone environment is changing. Although only 42% of the country's phones are so-called "smartphones" that run on operating systems from Apple Inc. and Google Inc., the number is increasing. Sales of smartphones in Japan hit 43.6 million at the end of March, a 70% increase over the past year, according to Japanese data tracker MM Research Institute, Ltd. By March 2015, smartphones could account for 54% of all cellphones in Japan, MM Research estimates.
Smartphones allow users to download applications directly onto their devices, meaning more and more users are bypassing DeNA and Gree's gaming sites. The apps generally sport shorter loading times, more fluid animation, better graphics and music than browser-based games.
"Serious structural issues are at play here," said CLSA analyst Jay Defibaugh. The social networks are not functioning as they used to, he said."That goes to the root of the companies' long-term viability."'