Nuvendil said:
What you fail to consider is the possibility (I would say reality at this point) that the demographic that desires handhelds has not shrunk, but rather the seventh gen was an anomalous meeting of multiple demographics. Let me explain it metaphorically. Say I created an orange peeling machine that's ssuper efficient and all the orange lovers out there buy it up like candy. I see this and continue to create improved iterations of my orange peeling machine, with each selling roughly the same amount. Then, a large group of potato lovers learn that my newest orange peeler is also pretty good at quickly peeling potatoes. Suddenly, my sales double as potato lovers start buying my orange peelers in mass. But then another company that was already making simpler vegetable peeling devices creates one that peels potatoes just as good as mine but is much cheaper since it doesn't have to deal with the difficulties of orange peeling. Suddenly, my sales drop sharply with my next model down to roughly the same numbers as before the potato peelers showed up. But has my market shrunk? The answer is yes and no. The people willing to buy my device has shrunk, but the target market has not. What happened was that a neighboring demographic interested only in specific aspects of my device rather than the device's full of core feature set had migrated over to my market. But once a device that filled their needs more easily came along, they had no reason to stay. But those interested in the core feature set are still there, meaning my target audience is roughly the same as always. This is what happened last gen with dedicated gaming devices, especially handhelds. You had a lot of people buy them who were only interested in a part of the handheld experience, a group interested in a much more limited form of gratification than the actual handheld demographic. Handhelds happened to provide what people wanted at the time, but they were never the demographic interested in buying dedicated handhelds seriously, they were interested in specific, limited uses they would get from them. As such, once smart phones became as ubiquitous as they are now, there was a cheaper means to get the gratification that they wanted. Yeah mobile gaming lacks a lot of the benefits of dedicated devices, but that group never cared about that. And now that those metaphorical potato lovers have moved on, the metaphorical orange lovers remain. They are just split between two devices instead of one with the GBA. But the numbers are headed for GBA territory when combined, which supports my claim. The 3DS will likely land at 60-65mil (or higher), Vita is headed for 12-15mil. This puts the handheld market at 72-80+mil. When you account for the slow starts of both devices and early marketing fumbles, that's about right if the demographic size is similer to GBA and prior (the GB got higher, but only due to a very long life span and the jump to color). In other words, the number of people interested in handhelds specifically is stable. The number buying has gone down, but that's due to the migration of a neighboring demographic that was only interested in handhelds for certain limited uses, not the handheld package itself. Nintendo's next handheld will likely to around GBA numbers since we all know Sony is leaving the handheld market and it will be Nintendo alone all over again. |
It's actually shrunk considerably from the GBA era even.
Nintendo shipped 13 million handhelds last fiscal year and are aiming to maybe get to 9.5 million-ish this fiscal year.
These are their lowest handheld shipments since 1996 or so, that's before the launch of Pokemon in the West.
They haven't had handheld sales this low in almost 20 years in other words. GBA's 80 million LTD is misleading, it likely would've sold well past 100 million had it been given a proper lifecycle and was consistently crushing 18-20+ million a year.
