If DS was a fluke where's the "inevitable" handheld decline?

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LuckyTrouble said:
I read through most of the thread and then things sort of got off the rails with defining a handheld.

My view on things:
Dedicated handhelds are on the way out. It's undeniable that sales are down significantly from the DS. This shouldn't be viewed as an upward trend still from the GBA, but a downward trend from the last relevant install base. For example, we didn't compare the Wii U to the Gamecube to determine if it was successful. We compared it to the Wii and saw a monumental loss in install base from one generation to the next.

Smartphones and tablets have stolen the casual gamer, and the more serious efforts developers make, the more people are willing to put time into bigger adventures on their existing touchscreen device. Particularly as tablets continue to blur the line between what we traditionally think of as a tablet and a laptop, with increasingly capable mobile hardware, we start to observe a merging of multiple previously separate hardware as differences further become negligible. Ultimately, what is the major difference between a tablet with a bluetooth keyboard and a run of the mill laptop? At this point, both are capable of providing an identical experience at pretty much identical prices, while the tablet has the added bonus of creating a unified system with my phone.

Dedicated handheld gaming consoles are not some distinctly separate entity from hardware becoming more unified, and I don't think it's all that far off base to say that Nintendo will never make a dedicated gaming handheld ever again, or that if they do, the next will be their last. I don't think the Switch will be the definitive game changer for their handhelds, likely to suffer from the shortfalls in battery life that keep tablets from being a more popular portable device than they already are, but I don't think it's a stretch to say that it will define the future of their handheld efforts.

You forgot all about the hybrid netbooks/laptops. And on the Windows side of things, all the new Windows devices should offer you somewhat identical experience and be connected to each other so you could continue your work, you started on a PC, on a tablet or a phone.

But yes, what we'll see in the future depends what the market want's. It's pretty easy to predict where the companies will invest, but predicting what the market will adopt, is a lot harder.