Will the iPhone kill traditional handhelds?

[Strategyking92]

Hisiru said:

Strategyking92 said:

Hisiru said:

 

"There’s more than twice as many developers making iPhone games as there are making games for the Nintendo DS or Sony PSP."

 

Which is not necessarily a good thing, since they can make mediocre games, good support isn't equal to quantity alone, but quantity and quality.

Which is not necessarily a good thing, since they can make mediocre games, good support isn't equal to quantity alone, but quantity and quality.

Did you noticed something? The Iphone is an incredible and strong device, but the lack of physical buttons is killing the poor device (as a portable gaming device). I can see it as a strong platform but not with a strong line-up (in general) if it doesn't works with some popular genres.

An impressive number of games doesn't mean an impressive number of quality and diversity, that's the problem with the Iphone.

I just think iPhone can other both hardcore and casual games on the device. And the digital distribution model is very, very attractive for devs.. It won't take traditional handhelds out soon, but in the future there won't be a need for them when every cellphone and multimedia device has some kind of game market. It's all about convenience. I'm not saying I support it, but in the future I can things going that way. Does it mean it will be a better device for playing games? Definetly not. But when everybody already has the system, you can see how dominance can be gotten.

Maybe the digital distribution model is attractive for devs but not for some users (you can't sell your game if you don't like it).

Non-traditional handheld devices have the tech to support the games, and developers are throwing support at it.

Quantity =/= Quality. The DS and the PSP has NEW games from popular franchises while the Iphone has ports/remakes without physical buttons.

oh yeah, iPhone is also getting the Phoenix wright series :-p

Which means, another later port/remake without physical buttons and not a new good game to show that the developer really want to give a big support for the platform, just easy money.

 

I keep hearing quantity=/= quality from you.. But do you look at the libraries of the DS and PSP? Shovelware outnumbers good games on both systems. You might say that they still have more high quality and impressive game, but think out the release dates of all of them:

2004/05 for the PSP and DS, while the iPhone OS app store came out in 2008. The psp and ds libraries are about 5 years old, the app store is only 2 years old. I would say just give it time. The late ports still bolster the iPhone library, whether you like it or not. The fact is, devs needed to see if it would be a viable platform, and it is. And while they were busy analyzing, indie devs reined, and created new dev powerhouses with growing legitimacy.

 

 

 

Nonetheless, people are buying up digital distributed games for the iPhone. Nintendo and sony sensed this and launched their own digital services. You can't think that was sure coincedence?