Will there ever be a handheld that outsells Nintendo's?

[Millennium]

Someday we might see a Nintendo competitor that beats it in the handheld space. This will not happen, however, until we see a competitor that understands handheld gaming better than Nintendo, and this has yet to happen.

The most basic truth that Nintendo's competitors fail to understand is this: a handheld system is not just a smaller console. Even Sony has failed to grasp this basic truth, as shown by their attempts to, as they themselves put it, "bring handheld gaming out of the ghetto." The problem with this philosophy is that there is no ghetto. Handheld gaming is by necessity very different from console gaming: not inferior by any stretch of the imagination, but merely different. Nintendo's competitors have tried to make small consoles at every step, and that is why they have failed.

Of course, that's just a broad philosophy. There are many specifics in which Nintendo's competitors fail, and these specifics are surprisingly close to universal.

1) Power -electric, not computational- is everything. Nothing else about a handheld console matters if it will not turn on: it becomes an expensive brick. This makes it imperative that the user be able to be reasonably confident that the machine will work even if it hasn't been used in a while, and strong battery life is an absolute must for that. The PSP has, to its credit, managed to do better than the Game Gear in this regard, but its battery life is still horrible.

2) Contrast is your friend. Portable games, by their nature, are often played in suboptimal-to-poor lighting conditions, not because of too little ambient light bit because of too much. There is only so much that backlighting can do to fix this problem, such that it may not even be worth including given the costs power-wise.

But the result of this is that even with backlighting, more attention needs to be paid to the color scheme of portable games. The bloom-ridden color schemes dominated by a single color that are so fashionable in console gaming today simply don't cut it on a portable; it becomes too hard in too many situations to tell what is going on.

3) Long periods of concentration are NOT your friends. Again by its nature, portable gamers face many interruptions as they play. The needs and circumstances of reality simply intrude more often when you don't have the walls of your home to block them out. This affects game design, because a really good portable game needs to be something that you can put down and pick up again quickly at any point, because users will have to do that.

A good portable game also has to account for breaks in the user's concentration. Such breaks will happen regardless of the user's skill or mental acuity, and therefore they must not have fatal consequences in the game.

4) Many gamers can't hear you. This is not just an issue of background noise, though that obviously takes its toll as well. There are simply many situations where the sound in portable games must be turned off, due to basic courtesy or other pressing needs, and headphones can only do so much. Rhythm games often have driving bass lines to help counteract this, but the small size of portable systems precludes that: the speakers would need to be bigger than the rest of the system combined.

5) People will drop your system. It happens, and not just to butterfingers: reality intrudes. Make sure your system is durable enough to withstand such shocks. A 1-meter drop (a little over three feet) should be taken as the absolute minimum here, but a 2-meter drop is better, just to be sure that even really tall people can safely drop the system.

6) Measure your users' pockets. Not all gamers can get or want specialized game cases. If your system cannot fit into, at the very least, the front pocket of a pair of blue jeans, the proper response is to redesign the system until it can. Being able to fit into smaller pockets is even better.

The PSP doesn't fail in all of these ways; for example, it (barely) fits into a large jeans pocket. But these points are the common threads that Nintendo's failed competitors share, one way or another, because they have tried to tackle portable gaming as nothing more than consoles done small. When they stop doing this, then they might someday stand a chance of beating Nintendo. Until then, it simply won't happen.