| Intrinsic said: Do you have any idea how many smartphones are sold daily worldwide? or in a month. That is the market that sony and nintendo are competing in when looking at handhelds. |
Yes, I know. But not every smartphone user wants to play games on that device and only a fraction of the smartphone / tablet gamers are going to pay more than 5 bucks for a mobile game. And many mobile games profit from real stick and buttons, the accessories for smartphones are still clunky or way overpriced and lack compatibility. Many smartphone users also don't want to drain their batteries while gaming and lose their accessability by phone for the rest of the day... with an additional device they don't have to worry about that.
I too have doubts that we will see another dedicated handheld from Sony but why the hell should they end the production of PSVita devices and shut down the PS-Store on the Vita in the next years if they are profitable and don't "bleed money"? The product is already on the market, what's done is done, R&D costs have been spent.
Sony gets its license fees for every Vita game sold digitally or at retail... if the digital revenue is higher than the maintaining costs of the PS Store it would be dumb to shut it down. If they switch 100% to Android & iOS instead, they would only earn revenue for their first party games (and would have to pay license fees to Apple, Google and Amazon). If they use their own mobile platform "PS Mobile" instead, they can keep the compatible PS Vita in the loop (the Vita-compatibility of the popular Unity-engine should help), so why ditch that hardware?
