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curl-6 on 16 July 2017
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Nuvendil said:
curl-6 said:

Those wanting a "premium" portable gaming experience beyond what phones offer are a hardcore minority though. I mean, us enthusiast gamers can talk all day about how crap phone games are, but the average consumers has low standards and is easily pleased. Where once parents bought their kids a Gameboy or DS, now they just get them a cheap tablet.

In the end though, I think the proof is in the pudding, that we'll likely never again see a mainstream device built just for portable gaming. (Excluding a possible 2DS-style Switchless Switch, which, if it gets made at all, would sell only a fraction of the hybrid model)

You're not getting what I am getting at: that 80 to 110 million is and always was that hardcore minority.  Handhelds have been mostly for hobbyist gamers for pretty much their entire existence.  The majority of the more flippant casual market that now games on phones were never interested in handhelds in the first place because it's not just putting it under your tv, you have to carry it around.  Until Gen 7 I don't think the majority of that market was casual, not even remltely close.  But of all the people who wanted gaming on the go, yes, handhelds have always, from the beginning, appealed to a minority as we now know.  The majority just never had a product for them and now they do.

And just because Nintendo stopped making them doesn't prove anything.  AAA devs stopped making horror games and claimed that the lack of them on the market proved they were dead when surprise surprise there was demand.  Difference here is that Nintendo is the undisputed handheld heavyweight champ and there's no one out there who can take up the torch.  And the Switch would pose a significant challenge. But if, say, Sony made the Switch and Nintendo made the next handheld, it would have been a fight but I very firmly believe they would habe had success.

The mobile and handheld markets appeal to very different demographics, now more than ever.

If there was a future for pure portables, companies would be making them, but there just isn't any need for them any more, between them phones and Switch have the audience portables once served covered.