Is their room for mobile dedicated consoles (Handhelds) anymore?

[Dr.Henry_Killinger]

Shadow1980 said:

archer9234 said:

And things level off. Why does it have to be one way or the other? Why can't both exsist. If enough of both sides work. They work. Their's no reason to murder one.

It's a common canard amongst analysts, both professional and armchair. Once something declines, they construe that as a terminal decline that will continue until sales reach zero. We actually saw a lot of that back in 2010-2012 when seventh-gen console sales began to decline. It was assumed that said decline was terminal and therefore consoles were doomed, completely neglecting the cyclical nature of the console market, which is easily illustrated here:

The same thing is happening now with handhelds. It's assumed that because this generation will see a huge drop off from the 236 million sold last gen, that must mean handhelds are doomed, and they'll point to mobile gaming as the "obvious" culprit, almost as if they're assuming that the vast majority of people who ever bought a Nintendo handheld or PSP will inevitably switch to playing mobile games by decade's end (because they're totally the same experience, right?). Any extenuating factors—in this case the existence of far better than average performance from Nintendo as well as the existence of a successful competitor—are ignored.

Unless Mobile gaming is a fad, unlikely considering Mobile isn't, its a big and recent problem that I don't think your chart is apt to describe. PCs are more threatened by mobile then consoles (with regard to Mobile Computing). Handhelds on the otherhand have two major significant threats from Mobile.

Suggesting Mobile Gaming to steal active userbase from Handhelds is a strawman, that I didn't mention. I'm considering  new gamers who unlike in previous generations have a ton more options to choose from, only one of which is for a propreitary single function device (Nintendo Handheld). All else equal, Nintendo gets a fraction of what it gained when it was the only one on the block or even with Sony. When you consider, that "Quality" is the only thing Nintendo will have (for a limited time) over these competitors, it looks pretty dismal, will new gamers even be aware of this quality? In this hostile red ocean, is it realistic to have a new succesful handheld competitor?

If new gamers aren't coming in, what about those who persist? Unless we have 100% adoption rate, and those who played handhelds in the past stop doing so for whatever reason, further decline is inevitable.

And then their is the development pressure of Mobile, with increasing production power of advancing devices, "Quality" really starts coming into question as well. Granted the mobile app market limits budgets to a degree, how good does a 1-5 $ game have to be to outshine a 20-40$ game. And once this becomes more standard than exception, what then will Nintendo or really any Mobile Dedicated Console manufacturer have in their favor?

 

I should clarify, I'm not saying the market will cease to exists, but rather become a niche market, and in someways it already is