StingingVelvet: I have nothing against people who game on a tablet, but one cannot argue multiplatform development doesn't impact games. The icons will be a little larger, the menus a little more listy, the combat perhaps a little slower. People deny to this day basing a shooter on an analog stick impacts design though, so it doesn't surprise me Orcish and others claim tablet development is a 100% win.
Who said the UI has to be the same? Ideally the interface should be abstracted, in fact it's typically very poor design to not do so (not gonna argue that a lot of game devs are just as shitty as any other kind of dev, but if their architects and team leads can't handle that they fucking suck).
The only way mobile development should affect anything else is a choked pipeline (i.e. different art assets have to be produced by a rather small team), much of this can be mitigated with experience.
I won't lie, I secretly suspect a lot of people in game development are so used to optimization that they are actually very bad at the opposite, which when resources are not constrained should be what they're doing. Even in game development they don't all agree, for example, see the various opinions of the Doom III source code and what people think vs. what Carmack thinks (for the record, as amazing as Carmack is, I don't think he's right on all counts, some of the critics are "right").
If you have separate mobile testers and developers working on the mobile UI, how exactly would mobile affect PC dev? It really shouldn't. I'm not saying it never does, but I am saying if it does the team has most likely made a mistake.
nijuu: definitely if your travelling or away for a while.or bored waiting lol.mobile phone is way too small to play anything except most casual games imho. too small for reading ebooks for extended periods too
GameRager: This....unless one owns a tablet, most phones are too small to enjoy playing such games with/on.
Not even remotely true, phones are actually more powerful than the computers those games were released on, they frequently can do things that the desktops of the day couldn't, like really great zoom and splitting the UI (e.g. for source of effect and target). Even so, 7 inch tablets are extremely common around here. Yes, I live in a tech heavy city but a lot of people own the Kindle Fire, or even more powerful 7 inch tablets, which is pretty capable compared to these games' needs. Yes, 10 inch tablets are kind of an exclusive club, even today, but 7 inchers are straight up fucking amazing and really common. My 10 inch iPad gen 4 probably has a way better screen resolution that 95% of the folks on this forum. The battery is fucking enormous, I could literally stream video for 8 hours straight (okay, really I'm guesstimating, the fucker never needs to charge and I use it a lot for battery straining applications).
As well, 5 inch phones with IPS panels are becoming more common (these types of panels are likely vastly superior to your LCD montior's panel, because you probably have a T/N panel). Mobile RPG gaming is straight up fucking awesome. I understand it's a complete waste if you don't have any time holding your dick when you could be gaming, but if you have the requisite dick-holding time in your daily routine, yeah, it rocks.