| OdinHades said: Just for comparison: Since 2007 there were at least 94 Million iPhones sold in the US - that's the number of active iPhones according to this article: http://www.cnet.com/news/nearly-100m-iphones-in-use-in-the-us-new-study-shows/ Worldwide, we are looking at an unbelievable number of 700 million iPhones. Add Android and you are at 2 billion devices. Now, if we assume that only 10 percent of smartphone users ever play games on their device, we still have an install base of 200 million people. That is insane. And your reason for the dying handhelds. I know you already heard it a bagillion times, but it's the hard truth. People play on smartphones today, end of story. |
Handhelds and smartphones are two different markets and cater to two completely different needs. An overwhelming majority of people buy phones for communication first and foremost, not to play games. A handheld only really has one function which is playing video games with the games costing about $40 a pop and for many people they can't justify buying a device that costs anywhere from $200 to $250 solely for one purpose (they don't hold it to that much value). Whereas a phone can be purchased for much cheaper and is an incredibly useful tool with the added value of being used for entertainment for free without much hassle. The only reason people game on a phone is because the games are so easily accesible and incredibly cheap with most of them being "free." If in order to play games on your phone you would have to buy a special add-on that costs anywhere fron $50 to $100 and the games not being free but costing about $20 or $40 each I'm pretty sure you would see a huge drop in the number of people playing games on their phones. People primarily buy handhelds to game, people primarily buy smartphones to communicate.
With that being said I do however think that smartphones are partly to blame for the decrease in handheld sales overall, but only due to it shifting the mindset of consumers by putting more value onto their electronic devices. Because before Smartphones we really didn't have anything that could "do-it-all" so to speak now a smartphone can take care of anything from listening to music to communicating with friends/family to watching movies. And now having just one electronic device that can only do one thing which is gamimg is kinda drab nowadays and doesn't have as big of a mass appeal, it just doesn't hold as much value in todays society compared to the past.
tl;dr I don't really think it's smartphones that are the reason for handhelds dying per se, I just think it boils down to convenience, price, and the value consumers deem a device to be.
