LurkerJ said:
It's not like Vita didn't fail hard as well. You just don't make a device like that without complete commitment to your vision. Not to mention, that Xperia Play made its attempt way too early, mobile chips and screens were too weak and consumed too much power. The story is different now. I want to believe Nintendo's Switch controllers can be hooked to any smartphone wirelessly, billions of smartphone and lots of games available to play, but BUTTONS can bring in the traditional gamers and widen the gaming audience on smartphones. |
It's not just technology and interface that holds phone games back. It's the economics more than either of those factors. Phone game developers and their customers have established "free" (quotes are added because even Apple won't use the word "free" any more so as not to risk being accused of false advertising, those apps simply say "Get") as the price point on mobile. Any price increase at all above "free" causes the audience to shrink exponentially. And the "freemium" model is generally to make the game so gimped and boring that you want to pay to make the game good (or more ridiculously, you're paying NOT to play the game since the freemium crap generally allows you to bypass the grindy stuff needed to get anything decent in a phone game). So that ensures that phone games will by and large be low-quality swipe-and-tap Skinner boxes. That audience generally isn't interested in gaming beyond that, and they don't really care about buttons whether they're built into the device or whether it's a controller that snaps onto the phone. There really isn't much crossover in that market.
The Xperia Play sucked while the Vita is a low-selling handheld with a lot of great games on it. But let's not kid ourselves that the Xperia Play would have been any hotter of an item if it had the gaming HP of a Vita, nor that the Vita would have been likewise any bigger of a success as a smartphone.
