What I’m seeing are two articles using hyperbolically pessimistic titles as clickbait, it wasn’t their argument. They focus more on the growth of mobile relative to the console space. Mobile not only grew, but grew significantly faster than the dedicated console space, and is now considerably larger. The majority of devs still look to mobile platforms for success, not home consoles. What they pointed out is actually accurate, barring their clickbait title—you could have argued their argument was hilarious at the time if you focused on the title.
Decline and change is happening. As has been pointed out by other users in this thread, Nintendo abandoned home consoles, Sony abandoned handhelds, and Nintendo has largely pulled away from handhelds as a major part of their strategy. Nintendo found great success with a hybrid device. Their handheld line is now an extension of the hybrid device’s marketplace, rather than a core strategy like their handhelds in the past. Additionally pointed out, the total volume of hardware sales has declined greatly from the massive sales during the Wii and DS generation. This dedicated console decline occurred, despite the massive overall growth of the gaming industry.
I think Nintendo should be applauded for reversing the trend of decline more than once, having industry scale impact. The reason Nintendo saw growth with the Switch is that it adapted and evolved into something more useful, similar to what it did with the Wii, and the DS, Gameboy, and NES before it. The Switch is a convergence of the different strategies Nintendo has used in the past, but also offers players a new experience. They’re also making the home console space much more attractive to indie developers—an initiative that started as early as the GBC, and saw improvements during Wii/DS/3DS, but it was the Switch that made it a mainstream thing. While ubiquitous software strategies began trending 15 years ago with companies like Apple and Google have pushed, Nintendo has gone with a ubiquitous hardware strategy with the Switch. Apple and Google are looking toward accessing software from a variety of devices, while Nintendo has adapted their hardware to use in a variety of situations—something I’m a big fan of.
To be realistic, outside of Nintendo, the dedicated console business is stagnant and shrinking.
I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.
