greenmedic88 said:
Mr Khan said:
greenmedic88 said:
I pre-ordered the 3DS and my initial POV on the unit has been nothing but positive, but i still have to question whether there is any legitimate growth to be found in the dedicated handheld gaming segment or whether it will even be able to maintain the same consumers who were former customers.
There wasn't a single game in the initial line up that I'd pay $40 for. Recognize that many of those titles sold at that price were purchased simply because of that age old "new console phenomenon" that inspires owners of a brand new device to buy really mediocre games they wouldn't look twice at a year into the console development cycle, just to have something to play on their new toy.
Perhaps the biggest question is whether the software being sold is actually worth $40 per title in the days where major publishers are now releasing smartphone developed versions of their main IPs at a fraction of the cost. For those who don't have an ear to the ground, the days where free and $.99 apps developed on a shoestring budget were the only options on smartphones is already over.
"I like buttons", "touch screen controls are terrible", "I like physical games", "I only play Nintendo games" while legitimate opinions, simply don't apply to the average user, who in all likelihood sees minimal beneift of a dedicated gaming handheld if they already carry a smartphone.
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Again, the only hole in this argument is content. If the dedicated handhelds draw the right games, they can make non-consumers (who would prefer to have just a smartphone) into consumers.
Now this makes it an uphill battle to be certain, but Nintendo's got the capability to make consumers out of non-consumers if anyone does
Hell, if it weren't for Nintendo, this whole argument wouldn't exist, and the whole market would've defaulted to non-dedicated platforms decades ago
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It wasn't possible to play games on phones with better hardware and better development tools than dedicated portable game systems prior to the iPhone 3G much less decades ago.The portable games market has changed more in the last two years than it has in the past twenty directly because of the iOS/Android market. It's easily the biggest disruption the market has seen since the advent of portable gaming.
There's no question dedicated handhelds will always have their built in market, but the days of them being the default portable gaming platforms for general consumers may well be over and frankly, all of the established IPs that were once only available on handhelds won't change that.
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Better hardware is highly subjective in this case, when so much of that hardware advantage is lost on non-game capabilities and a design that is not intuitive for gaming. Granted, disruption comes from the segments of the market that are willing to put up with good enough, but this will hamper the mobile market's ability to actually get killer apps of its own, and i'm talking about stuff that actually brings people to the platforms, not stuff that gets downloaded 100 million times because people happen to own the platform in question.
Compelling games content will, for the next cycle at least, still be the realm of the dedicated device.
Now if Apple were actually interested in selling iPhones for games, they would start to invest in some studios of their own, but until then, they'll be unable to do damage to the dedicated market
