|
Grimes said: Smartphones with apps is a recent phenomenon. Prior to the iPhone, there wasn't much of a market for games. The growth in the past 2 years has been incredible. Most of the market growth in portable gaming will probably occur in the smartphones, whereas the dedicated units growth will slow or perhaps even shrink. They might not kill the market for dedicated units, but a stagnant/declining market is not something to look forward to. Nintendo does have an ace up its sleeve with smartphones. They can always port their library to other systems. At any time they could release the GBA library and sell a ton of games. Nintendo also have the best handheld game designers in the world, so they could release new games on other systems if it was in their best interest. |
Not really, read my post above about how media predicted doom and gloom for handhelds prior to GBA launch, and how DS, quoting myself, "was partially an answer to those claims and threats from below as wel as threat from above - PSP".
Smartphone boom began in 2001, admittedly a lot of apps were completely free and there were no distribution models for selling apps with meaningful revenue at the time. Even today when mobile phone gaming, a mere portion of content that sells to mobile phone users, nearly outpaced handheld gaming in revenue, it's accounted for ~$5 billion worldwide (too much for "no games prior to iPhone", eh?), but still remains highly segmented market. Recent Apple success is the only platform with some meaningful marketshare, if we choose to believe last report it's about ~10% of total game sales on mobile phones. It might go up but it has natural barrier of growth - most lucrative market with highest potential of growth in mobile gaming is Asia, Apple devices sell badly in that region. Not saying though that problem can't be fixed in the future.
Of course mobile gaming is to grow more rapidly than handheld gaming, as I've said already - it nearly outpaced handhelds in revenue. But the situation is no differenet than in PC vs console biz. PC business is almost equal to all consoles combined, according to last reports it's going to grow at faster pace as well. Console gaming still mainstream, but it's growth potential is nowhere near to other segments. Overall, as you may see, situation is absolutely similar to non-portable gaming - non-dedicated gaming machine, aka PC, vs dedicated gaming machines, aka home consoles. Both markets somehow able to co-exist for the time being, at some point PC gaming even was proclaimed "dead", when in truth it shifted to low-end compared to home consoles.
Bottomline - if we're going to predict that smartphones are about to kill handheld gaming , then we should be consistent and predict that home consoles will be butchered by PC gaming as well - very similar situations.
