Nintendo and Sony have to bring out Handheld/Phone hybrids in 2017.

[Darwinianevolution]

KBG29 said:

Darwinianevolution said:
The mobile phone market is an incredibly oversaturated market. Any new competitor will have to suffer a lot in order to get any kind of marketshare, and gaming is not the key element here. Mobile gaming is big due to a series of elements that make it different from regular gaming, and even then, it's not the element that pushes the market (social interaction, multimedia, internet browsing...).

If Sony and specially Nintendo had to push their own mobile brand they would face way more trouble than it's worth. Sony at least has the Xperia foothold there, but Nintendo has his software and IPs wich, while highly successful in a mobile environement, would not be enough to make people choose their phones over others.

And let's be real. If Microsoft, with all its power, influence and money, has not been able to make Windows Phones something popular, what can Sony and Nintendo do?

Two Things,

1) Sony has no foot hold with Xperia. It is loosing them billions, with no hope of profits in the future, and is a brand that is on its way to selling less than 10 million units a year.

2) Why would Sony and Nintendo succeed when Microsoft failed? Simple, they are bringing something new to the market. Microsoft tried toenter the market as another me too slab phone. They did not capitalize on any of their assets,a dnt hey entered way to soon. Finally, it is not over for Microsoft in mobile. Once UWA builds a massive catalog, they will be back, and the next phone will have amazing app support, and be backed buy Xbox for games, and a much better Cortana and Bing.

Still does not answer the question of what could Sony and Nintendo do in regards to making their own phone and/or mobile OS. If the Xperia is as big of a loss as you describe it, why would Sony try to push their own brand of phone even further? Like I said, gaming is not the key to make a phone successful, it's just one of the many elementd to take into account with them. The reason why mobile is hurting handhelds so much is because parents can now get a cheap gaming device (that the kids would need anyway) that has a giant backlog of free to play and serves as a multimedia/internet browser device. Nintendo can push their mobile offerings into android or IOs, but if they tried to lock the market with their own closed OS or phone, it would fail.

And about Microsoft's UWA system. Why would the backing of XBox Live games be that much useful? I doubt many phone users care about the kind of games you could get on XBox Live, and many XBox Live users would rather get their games on much more powerful hardware.