| Nuvendil said: Well there hasn't even been enough time to examine a post-Switch market, but companies didn't make handhelds much because every company that tried got systematically eviscerated by Nintendo. The Game Gear, Lynx, Wonder Swan, NeoGeo Pocket Color, the N-Gage, now the Vita. The only successful competitor to Nintendo in handhelds was the PSP, but even then the DS sold almost 70 mil more. Companies just gave up because handheld gaming was basically a monopoly under Nintendo. Will there be new ones in the future? No, because even at a cap of 90 to 120 million sales, dedicated handhelds are still a minority at their best and Nintendo can hold on to a very large part of that with the Switch. I'm just saying the demand did not go away. Nintendo just moved on and no one is there to take their place and also they still habe a foot in that camp. |
There would be demand from a small niche of hardcore enthusiasts for a premium handheld experience, but I don't think it would be viable to cater to this niche for the long term since the bread and butter of the portable market, kids, are being swallowed up by tablets. Where in the 90s or 2000s parents bought their kids a Gameboy or a DS, now they get them a cheap tablet so they can play Minecraft in the car. I work with kids for a living, the shift over the past 4 years or so has been drastic. Back in 2012 they all played on DS/3DS, now it's pretty much entirely tablets.
Except last month one of the kids brought their Switch to a function, explained that it could hook up to a TV and be a console as well, and piqued the interest of a lot of his peers. It wasn't the idea of a premium portable experience that had them intrigued, it was the 2-in-1/hybrid/Switch and play concept.
