Why are handhelds often seen as inferior or not as important as home consoles?

[hunter_alien]

BraLoD said:

hunter_alien said:

Considering that Nintendo has at least 5 or 6 franchises that sell more than the vast majority of other AAA titles out there on the 3DS alone, this statement is less than correct IMO. Big stuff? What does that mean? No CoD? It has Pokemon. No Halo? It has Mario. No Gran Turismo? It has Mario Kart...

Mostly the 'games of the moment', which are usually third party AAA games.
I'm not talking about sales, which Nintendo handhelds have a lot (the DS pulled basically a PS2), but that handhelds are excluded from the part of gaming moving foward with hardware limitations, I'm talking about gaming appeal and relevancy.
They simply don't get the games people are always talking about, they do get games that sell a ton, but not the games people are talking about, the 'new, big stuff', thus like the Wii U for example, it means they are usually excluded from being platforms with the appeal of modern gaming.

I do understand what you are saying and I agree with most of it. Games like Call of Duty, FIFA or Battlefront dont end up on handhelds or if they do, they appear in  a limited form. But they do move forward in their own paralel way. Also they are often far better of becoming cult classics than most console games, which pretty much die off after every itteration. People still talk about NSMB but nobody is talking about CoD: WaW anymore.

 

What I really dont get is the bolded part. If any platform has to move forward with hardware limitations, than the handhelds are the perfect examples. They where always "retarded" hardware wise and developers had to do their best to get and keep gamers attention simply by expanding as much as they could gameplay wise often using gimmicks that the manufacturers added to the system itself.

Again, I would like to point out that I mostly get your point, I just think that handhelds are underrated when it comes to the world of gaming.