What do you want from Nintendo's next handheld?

[famousringo]

spemanig said:

famousringo said:
So what I'm mostly getting here is that you want the next handheld to be a Vita, maybe with two screens.

Honestly, I'm not sure Nintendo should spend any more resources on the handheld market. Japanese third parties and indies are the only other people making games for it, and the burden of being the driving force behind handheld consoles is detracting from the resources Nintendo can bring to bear on home consoles, which have a somewhat brighter future.

The solution might be to integrate handheld and home console into a single entertainment strategy, but the execution is riddled with pitfalls and the payoff might not really be worth it.

...Not at all. And I would riot if Nintendo stopped making handhelds.

Here's the problem. We are three years and seven months into the current handheld generation, and the 3DS has sold 44.2 million units while the PSV has sold 8.7M. A the same point in the last cycle, the DS had moved 74 million units and the PSP 38.6M.

That's a 40% collapse in DS sales and over a 50% collapse in the handheld market as a whole. Western publishers have already jumped ship, and Japanese publishers are making their exit now. The only company pushing handhelds right now is Nintendo, with a string of extremely compelling games.

Part of me thinks, "Hey, it's Nintendo's market. Why not ride it until handhelds become truly unsustainable?"

And the answer is opportunity cost. What if all those software titles that drove people to buy a 3DS drove them to buy a Wii U instead? What would Nintendo's fortunes look like if they were strong in a market that hasn't already been abandoned by everybody else? Hell, the 3DS is already a home console in my usage patterns, and I doubt I'm alone.

Unless Nintendo can pull out a Wii-like innovation that makes people set down their tablets and smartphones and pick up a handheld, they should focus on leveraging their handheld assets into home consoles. Maybe a Wii 3 tablet that you can actually load up with games and play away from home.