KBG29 said:
This is nowhere near the ball park of thinking people would buy an SD console with a remote. This is saying people will buy a phone that can play their entire library of PS4 titles, and allow full access to PSN and online gaming via 4G. This is something the market has never had the opertunity to experience, and the natural evolution of a once, very popular gaming market that was called handheld gaming. This is the addition of a features both Sony and Nintendo bypassed with 3DS and Vita, and totally killed a market the was rapidly growing. As for cost. I already said it would be more expensive to manufacture than the iPhone 7, and yes probably close to twice as much. However, neither Sony, nor Nintendo have ever been about running a mass profit business, they have always been about bringing the joy of gaming to the largest market possible, and reinvesting profits back into the software and experiences. That is why even if the device cost $350 to manufacture compared to the $225 of an iPhone, the actual consumer price would be $400, as opposed to the outragious $650 price tag of the base iPhone 7. Like I said above. Both companies would be profitable, because owning the platform leads to massive profits through royalties. It is the same way that a small market like game consoles can be so profitable when it is so small compaiered to Mac or Windows. On your idea about a shell that parteners with a phone. That could very well work. It could be the trojan horse peripheral that leads to a gaming phone in the future. It we could get something like that with full industry backing, and full support of either Nintedo or Sony, then I would be all for it. |
... but they won't be able to buy a phone that can play their entire library of PS4 titles. The technology to do that currently does not exist, and likely will not exist for some time, especially at a manufacturing cost you seem to think is arbitrary. And you're also assuming that Sony and Nintendo already possess the technical know-how to develop a phone capable of emulating the PS4/NX perfectly, and adapting the PS4/NX operating system to do all of the necessary phone functionality users would expect. It stands to reason that the R+D cost for Sony or Nintendo to develop a device would be signifcantly higher than Apple's R+D cost to develop the iPhone.
And again, you're assuming that it only truly costs $225 to manufacture an iphone, and you're ignoring all of the additional costs of getting that phone in consumers hands. Perhaps it does actually only cost $225 per unit in parts, what if it costs an additional $300 per unit in R+D, assembly, QA, packaging, shipping etc? You're ignoring so many of the other costs to bring a product to market, just taking them for granted. On top of that, why on earth would Sony or Nintendo undercut the price of the iPhone if a) it's significantly more powerful b) significantly more capable and c) costs signifcantly more to make. There is no reason to think that this phone would not be the most expensive phone on the market when it is released. Any argument against this can easily be chalked up to "wishful thinking".
Also, why do you think users want to deal with yet another cell phone operating system in its infancy? How about you ask Blackberry about how having a buggy, laggy, feature sparse operating system compared to their competition leads to horrifically bad sales. Blackberry used to be a dominant force in the cell phone business. But they let their competition surpass them and couldn't catch up. If cell phone specialists such as Blackberry, who were once a dominant market leader, couldn't put together a user experience that would rival the likes of Apple and Google, what makes you think Sony can when they have tried and failed many, many times before?
No cell phone will every get "full industry backing". Because it's a fucking cell phone, and users have clearly demonstrated en masse they have absolutely no interest in ever spending any more than $10 on a game for their phone. Anyone game company who has tried to charge more than that has lost their shirts. Companies can't even charge $60 for 3DS and Vita games, because the user base won't support it, and that's a dedicated game console. Why would this time be different?
