Back in the days when it was a player on the console industry's top table, THQ also had a solid mobile division.

Like its parent however, THQ Wireless has been heavily reorganised in recent years; with the bulk of its legacy carrier business sold to Swedish outfit 24MAS in early 2011.

Still, that hasn't stopped THQ CEO Brian Farrell musing about mobile and portable games at the GamesBeat conference in San Francisco.

Shrinking

"The dedicated handheld market is gonna find an audience but it isn't gonna be as broad because of the competition from other operating systems," VentureBeat reported him as saying.

"What the market is telling us, is consumers want a very quickly consumable mobile experience, it doesn't necessarily have to be deep."

This contradicts Nintendo's boss Satoru Iwata, who claimed a survey showed players who bought virtual goods in social games were more likely to buy DS games.

As for Farrell, he sees the next generation of consoles merging into mobile platforms.

"We believe Apple is going to be there, Google is going to be there," he said.

"Our view is that the next generation of consoles, if there are consoles, are gonna be less about technology and more about service orientation of the gamer."

[source: VentureBeat]