Portable console gaming is dead

[nuckles87]

A few things:

Inflation is kind of irrelevant, since the average wage hasn't increased with inflation, it's fallen behind. So even if the value of the console is essentially the same, that doesn't negate the fact that consumer buying power has fallen.

3DS has been doing fine since the price drop, and Nintendo hasn't been losing money on it for awhile now. Nintendo's main problem right now isn't the 3DS, but the Wii U, which is where that red ink is now coming from.

This sort of doomsday soothsaying has been going on for more then a decade now in some shape or form, and it's never really come to pass. I DO think there may come a time when gaming consoles will be absorbed into other technologies, simply because that's where technology is heading now. Eventually this stuff will all be done over cloud servers and you won't even really own hardware anymore, just an interface that connects to hardware and a server. This'll cut a lot of the cost out of having to own and upgrade to the latest technology, but it'll also probably be at least a decade or more before this technology becomes viable for mass market (I can't get decent cloud game play going even on a hardwire cable connection). Until then,dedicated set top boxes will continue to have their place. Not everyone is going to own a $1000 gaming PC, and the technology is still way too expensive to just include in smart TVs and tablets that aren't subsidized by software sales like consoles are.

There is always going to be a market for dedicated game devices, both at home and on the go, in some shape or form. The form this technology will take will certanly change (for instance, consoles will be replaced by cloud gaming services and the only actual dedicated hardware you'll need is a controller or handheld streaming device) but they will always exist simply because there is a large, established market for these types of experiences that isn't going to go away. The millions of people who want to play Cal of Duty won't just stop playing Call of Duty. The millions of Nintendo fans aren't going to suddenly stop buying 30 year old brands like Mario and Zelda. The worst that's going to happen to this industry is that it's going to become more niche, which will mean fewer publishers and fewer big games. But the experiences will always be there, and I wouldn't be surprised if they remain at $40-$60 to boot. Though, we may see other models like subscription and episodic models take off in order to compensate for higher development costs and a smaller market, but we're still talking about a market that will have tens of millions of players in it.

Portable systems aren't going to die, game consoles aren't going to die, big game experiences aren't going to die. This is tantamount to saying that the movie, book, or music industries will die (and they've all certainly had their shares of woes at one point or another). There are simply too many people who enjoy these experiences for that to happen. There is a HUGE gulf between "not selling as well as the fastest selling gaming consoles of all time" and "dying".