I still love the "phones killed portables" assumption.
DS sales were explosive and unrepeatable in the same manner that PS2 sales were explosive and unrepeatable. A PS3 with no Blu-Ray, a standardized CPU, and a $400 price point wouldn't have sold as much as the PS2. A 2DS XL launching at $170 in 2011 with good first party games would never have gotten near DS lifetime sales.
3DS was overpriced, and tiny, with an 8 month drought of games to start the system off.
Vita was a train wreck on just about every level. It was the Wii U of handhelds.
Many PSP/Vita customers were never going to switch over to 3DS for portable gaming. Those PSP/Vita gamers wanted portable FPS and console style adventure games. 3DS was never going to have those. (Part of Switch's success is that it does offer those type of games, and that has in turn brought much of the Vita/PSP crowd to the system.) So you can't just point to the total handheld lifetime sales of Vita + 3DS and go "See you guys the market shrank from 230 million with DS/PSP to 93 million with Vita/3DS! "
The bolded statement above is just as dumb as Pachter's "Oh hey you guys Wii + 360 + PS3 lifetime sales is more than Wii U + XB1 + PS4 lifetimes sales! Therefore the console market is shrinking!"
Pachter fails to take into account the fact that there was less of a reason to own both HD Twins in the PS4/XB1 era due to PS4 being able to play virtually all the games XB1 had and vastly more. There's a huge 30-40 game gap in the XB1 to PS4 libraries when it comes to games rated at 80% or higher on Opencritic. This gap is in PS4's favor. 360 on the other hand went toe to toe with PS3 in terms of exclusives and 3rd party support. Now that XB1 lacks enough exclusives and 3rd party support to compete most people just stopped buying both an MS and a PS system, because there was no need.
Anyway you can't just "bean counter" it up and go "oh see this gen is losing to last gen!" Those are the same people that point out that 3DS + Wii U is currently beating Switch lifetime sales, without taking into account that many people owned both a 3DS and a Wii U, (for the purposes of having access to all Nintendo games) but nobody needs to own two Switches to play all Nintendo games.
Last edited by Cerebralbore101 - on 04 November 2019
