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Scoobes on 24 February 2013
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RolStoppable said:
Scoobes said:

1. I agree with you, but I think it's flawed to only look at the console market (the sports/super car market in your analogy) as in the OP, especially when one of the points is how Nintendo manage to appeal to mainstream audiences. We should be looking at the entire market rather then focussing on a small if significant niche. I know that this is a console centric site but I think we discount the wider gaming market too much especially now that smart device revenue (not including ad revenue) is surpassing that of dedicated handheld gaming devices.

2. I'm talking purely on a publishing side and going purely on numbers. As all 3 develop consoles it'd be suicide for all 3 of their platforms. There are obviously more reasons and advantages to stick to developing your own platform and software.

How is the home console and handheld market combined a small niche?

When I said 'small' I meant individually, but even combined they're not as significant as one might think. In the US in 2010, console gaming revenue (handheld, console + DLC) accounted for 43% of total gaming revenue and had decreased by nearly 30%. This in a region which is supposed to be strong for console gaming.

I linked a report by BBC earlier saying smartphone/tablet game revenue had just surpassed discrete handheld software revenue (even with the price differential per game) and that's not including the additional revenue from adverts. The latest reports for smartphone/tablet games (http://www.newzoo.com/trend-reports/mobile-games-trend-report-free/) shows that at least 53% of gamers play on smartphones/tablets increasing to up to a maximum of 79% (depending on country). There are at least 500M people downloading games on mobile devices with at least 175M of them paying for content. So the number of people playing on mobile devices is huge when compared to dedicated consoles.

Now add in MMOs, PC downloads, boxed PC games, social games (e.g. facebook games), browser games etc. and dedicated console/handheld gaming becomes a much smaller piece of an ever growing pie. Furthermore, out of all those market segments, console/handhelds are the only ones showing negative growth.

Edit: Obviously boxed PC sales have also been showing negative growth in favour of downloads so it should be boxed PC, console and handhelds showing negative revenue growth.




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