This article is full of hand waving and I after reading it I still don't understand what a "marketing story" is. To focus on the stuff I did understand (but took issue with):

>> The odds are increasingly stacked against any developer who’s unable to pull a Peter Molyneux and attract a whole lot of press attention to a zany idea. Their problem is that most often their games look and act very similar to others’ games, have the same look, gameplay and overall dynamic as competitors’ games.

No, two things are going on here: Peter Molyneux innovated and "most often their games look and act very similar to others’ games". Peter Molyneux's cube was a publicity stunt and it pretty much worked. But you don't need to do the same thing to attract attention for a decent game idea provided that it's somehow innovative, polished and fun.

>> That’s why Apple has all the power on the App Store, why Google is sort-of getting there with the Play store, and why Zynga has all the power within the sub-ecosystem it has developed on Facebook. In commodity markets, visibility is everything.

This is the real core of what we're talking about. It was the case for a brief period that an indie could sell a game in the App Store with little marketing and have it become an App Store hit. Then the market filled with both established publishers and hobby developers and -- holy shit -- started to resemble just about every other low-barrier-to-entry market and the gold rush was over.

When people say the sky is falling on mobile they are lamenting the end of the gold rush. Those are different things.

>> This year the tablet space in particular has had a marked increase of graphical polish, and that trend shows every sign of continuing. In some respects it’s like watching the console and PC games industry play its story out all over again, but with good reason: Graphics, in particular a stylish look, can really push a game forward into the market in ways that innovation rarely does ... However this does not give much solace for the developer who cannot afford to spend a fortune.

It's surprising to hear something like this out of someone inside the industry. Art costs for mobile games, including many of the top earners, are not particularly high. Compared to marketing and programming costs art won't cost a fortune for nearly any mobile game.

Also, polish isn't just about graphics. It's really an all encompassing effort. The developer who isn't willing to invest the time and money polishing something created solely for pleasure is probably doing the wrong thing.

>> This newfound tribal funding and evangelism model has appeared at a time when the official industry finds itself in a deeply troubled state. Nobody’s really sure whether they even want a new console anymore, or a gaming PC, or whatever. Developers have no idea which market will be the hot ticket, or which might at least allow them to survive. The metrics simply do not track fast enough for anyone to have a firm grasp on what the hell is going on anymore.

New consoles: Nintendo has put out one incrementally advanced new console of which the sales were OK and now the console industry is dead? We don't have a choice about new consoles because the important ones -- Xbox and PS -- aren't out yet and no one knows how much of a step forward they'll be. If they make us go "wow" they're likely to go quick. If they're less thrilling they'll still do fine because they're new and the AAA gaming industry continues to produce high quality content that people enjoy. On the other end of the power spectrum, OUYA was a mega-success in terms of people voting with their wallets.

This type of sky is falling article is unfortunately very common in the game industry. I read a couple a week though many of them are postmortems and therefore have more value than this article. The main themes are not the market conditions themselves but: 1) companies that failed to acquire the necessary knowledge or 2) companies that did acquire that knowledge but failed to act on it.

[Edited]