| Kongfucius said:
I know, though I haven't had much time to play it recently I love my Vita as well. However, I'm not sure about the future of handhelds - mobile is rising significantly in Japan as well, even the 3DS isn't immune, and if you look in one of the Japan-sales threads you'll see it's beginning a fairly steep decline year on year. Now it may well be saturation, but I think mobile is shrinking the potential number of people to sell handhelds to and there's a question mark over whether the market will be big enough to support 2 platforms in Gen9 |
People are going where the games are. They are by and large not on handhelds anymore. iOS probably gets more exlcusive games than Vita and 3DS combined. iOS and Android got more titles from major Japanese developers than both combined in more recent years. That shifting of development resources is why Vita and 3DS wont hit their predecessors hardware sales. People buy Hardware to use software.
Head over to metacritic and look at the amount of iOS games compared to handhelds. It's about 3 pages worth of games for Vita total and 3 pages for 3DS. I get 6 pages for PSP alone. 12 pages for DS. If I restrict iOS and only include the highest scoring iOS games I get 24 pages. It's cheaper and easeir to make those games and they don't have to worry about the hassles of certification and they get more money per sale.
If Sony and Nintendo continue down their current paths there is no future for handhelds.
