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greenmedic88 on 03 April 2011
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RolStoppable said:
greenmedic88 said:

No. They are a threat because they are canibalizing sales by consumers who once only had the option of playing games on a Nintendo DS or PSP if they wanted to play portable games and didn't want to play terrible ports of old games on their phone.

While the market isn't seeing any major developers lead developing on iOS or Android currently, it's hard to overlook signs like Epic adapting Unreal Engine for iOS, giving developers a powerful set of pre-made tools and resources for creating games on the platform.

It's not going to be long before the major publishers move past the ports of classic games phase in iOS and Android game development.

So never say "zero possibility." Because people can quote you on that.

That doesn't really sound convincing. People who know enough about handhelds and phones to make an educated decision most likely also know about the current and future limitations of smartphone gaming. While slow games like RPGs work, pretty much everything that requires high precision and fast reflexes is a no-go, hence why people keep saying that at the very least a d-pad and a couple of buttons are required for proper gaming on the go.

I think Square-Enix has already moved past porting, didn't they release an original RPG a few months ago? I forgot how it is called. While things like that are bound to happen, people interested in games of that scope (and bigger) will continue to buy handhelds, simply because there's a greater selection of quality software and exclusive at that. Partly, because not every game will be ported and partly, because not every game can be ported.

The people who are buying into iOS and smartphone gaming now are primarily those who have never seen a reason to own a handheld in the first place. There will of course be people who will stop buying a handheld, because they are satisfied with gaming on their phone alone, but likewise, there will also be people who will buy their first handheld after starting with phones, because they want more.

In the end, smartphones and handhelds are not a case of seesaw, where one side goes down when the other goes up and vice versa, but two separate co-existing markets similar to PCs and home consoles. The record growth of iOS in the last two years hasn't put a dent into the DS software market, so unless you can prove otherwise, there is no reason to believe that these two things are in direct competition with each other.

We'll just have to wait and see. This isn't a contest to see who can come up with the most convincing argument. It's just an issue of where one sees the portable gaming market moving towards.

I don't see big growth potential in dedicated gaming devices, not that this doesn't mean there isn't a huge userbase currently in place.

The question is what percentage of those mobile gamers are going to be playing most of their games on a Nintendo or Sony handheld in the next couple of years and just as importantly, what percentage of those will have migrated to the 3DS or the NGP.

And the reason why iOS growth hasn't had an effect on the DS software market is simply because it's evolving so quickly that what was available even just a year back doesn't reflect what's available today or what's currently in development.

Of course there's still a big market for dedicated portable platform games otherwise developers wouldn't have been so excited over the prospect of developing for the 3DS and NGP. It would probably be just as much of a missed opportunity to skip developing a next gen 3DS or NGP title as it would be to completely ignore iOS and Android as a publishing platform.