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Mummelmann on 23 September 2012
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phenom08 said:
Mummelmann said:
phenom08 said:
Mummelmann said:
 

The Vita? The Vita is a flop, in my honest opinion. Handhelds have overstayed their welcome and will be fazed out of the market within 5-10 years. I don't hate Nintendo, I just don't see the vision and plan with the WiiU, the console has no focus and is all over the place and I cannot fathom why some people expect it to perform on par with the Wii.

As for my gaming preferences; I play the PC and that's pretty much it. I own all three consoles but I don't really use them, except my PS3 for movies, that is.

I understood everything but the "handhelds have overstayed their welcome" part. Fazed out in 5-10 years, yeah right lol. Maybe Sony's handheld division but definitely not Ninty's. Do you even play handhelds? If you did then you would actually know what you were talking about.


The handheld market will be overtaken and killed by/merge with tablet and phone gaming, its pretty obvious, we'll see a massive decline in Japan first and then US and Europe will follow shortly after. Its already happening, no handheld will ever sell anywhere near as many units as the DS did, it was the last great one. I don't need to like or play handheld to make observations about them and the market. Phone and tablet gaming is not a viable alternative to home consoles but certainly for handheld games.

It's already happening? Are you sure? Have you seen Kowen's "3DS vs. DS vs. PSP vs. PSV" thread. It's pretty clear to me you haven't, if you had you would know the 3DS is right on the DS's ass and things are getting worse for the DS since the 3DS hasn't had it's 2nd holiday season while at the same point in the DS's life it had already had its second holiday. So no you are wrong the only handheld in trouble is the Vita.

Oh, is that so? Like the Wii was tracking way ahead of the PS2 and this proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the lifetime sales record would be crushed? Seeing the sales trends of this generation, if the 3DS isn't even ahead at this point, it will fall way, way short of the target.

Galaki; I don't read doom articles, it just seems very likely with the way technology is leaping forward and with the branching out of gaming, there is no way to sustain so many different markets , especially when two or more of them will become very similar. Developers will choose the path of least resistance; i.e tablets and phones, lower development costs (by a lot) and massive installed base. Focus will continue on home console/PC and phones/tablets, there is no sense in spending your budgets three ways, especially considering how extreme the profit margins of popular phone/tablet games are. The modern market is also pretty soon moving way too fast for dedicated handhelds to be worth R&D and distribution since they won't be viable without massive updates or simply new versions all together at a fairly fast pace. This will also produce a moving target for developers, a situation not to be desired by anyone.

The incentive for buying handhelds purely dedicated to games will disappear, the process is well underway, and if they merge into multimedia devices and try to compete with phones and tablets, they will be rendered obsolete, as the Vita is currently proving. I believe that the 3DS will be the last proper handheld console with huge focus on games that will sell any relevant numbers (relevant compared to phones, that is).

From a technical and economic standpoint, it makes a lot of sense and you can forget about the notion that developers want to make deep and engaging gaming experiences, most of them simply want to make money and lots of it. Just look at EA and Activision's current top sellers and incredible shallowness and stupidity of it all. Gaming companies are businesses, they worship the dollar and not their customers.