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Rainbird on 20 September 2011
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Phoeniks.Wright said:
Rainbird said:

You're making a very big assumption in saying smartphones are the PCs of the portable space, and I don't believe your reasoning is sound enough. I agree with your points, but you are taking a very narrow look at it. 

1) Why are consoles popular? Because they're easy to use, and they provide lots of great games to play on your TV.

2) Why are smartphones popular? Because they're easy to use and provide lots of great apps, including games.

3) What makes a smartphone different from a PC? You have lots of things you may need to take care of, they're big and heavy to carry around (in most cases) and a good gaming PC can be quite expensive.

I know this is a very simple outlook as well, but gaming on your phone is much more real now that there are actually games to play on them. Angry Birds is a huge success, and publishers are putting more and more of their IPs on smartphones. There might be similarities to the PC, but there a lot of differences too.

And I have to say, I see more old people buying tablets then I do buying handheld gaming consoles. Tablets and smartphones are succesful with that audience for the same reason the Wii and Kinect is, it's a natural user interface, and it doesn't look intimidating to someone with very little technological experience.

Yeah, but games are a secondary function for smartphones, and a primary function for handhelds. Although this might not be enough people, I don't know anybody who bought a smartphone to play games on it, yet every one I know bought a games console to play a game on it. This behaviour shows that smartphones and handhelds don't compete directly, and so have very little effect on each other's sales.

As for smartphones getting more and more games, all the better! This won't affect handhelds in any meaningful way, but the more people play and enjoy games, the better.

Yeah, although I wouldn't buy apple products, I recognise that they have an excellent interface, but I must disagree with the interface being the sole reason for the Wii's success, it was maily the games, but yeah, making the Wii controller look like a remote and a NES pad was a brilliant move.

Again you have the right sentiment, but you're not backing it up with any substantial evidence. Using people we know as a source of evidence isn't good enough. A useful fact would be one like "iOS and Android accounted for a third of the total revenue in handheld gaming in the U.S. in 2010", which means that the market for video games on smartphones is quite significant. I'm sure the continued stream of games on smartphones means some potential dedicated handheld buyers will already be satisfied by their smartphones, though I don't have any concrete data to back it up with.

And sorry if my point about the Wii came across as the interface being its sole reason for being succesful, there was a bunch of factors involved of course. Giving people a more natural way to interact with their games is a very big reason for its success though.