Why wasn't the PSP vs. DS a repeat of the PS1 vs N64?

[Jumpin]

IcaroRibeiro said:

PSP was in many ways Nintendo Switch without Nintendo games. Think of "ok but how good would br Switch without Nintendo own games?" The answer is PSP, it was mostly for players who wanted good games in portable format

DS was significantly cheaper even for developers. This was the generation where Japanese devs were struggling to catch western devs, so DS offered an opportunity to keep in the market since they couldn't develop for PS3 and Wii was... well Wii. Not everybody knew or were interested to learn how to work with crappy motion controls

This was enough to provide DS enough games. Nintendo even had the foresight on adding a dual screen to prevent their games could not be ported to PSP, it was a brilliant move that secured a more dry third part support to Playstation

Sony developers didn't know a thing about creating good portable games (or any good game for that matter but I digress). If they could at least release 3 or 4 good IPs in the same way Nintendo does I'm sure PSP could have pulled something in the 100 million and even removed for market share from Nintendo, but it's Sony we are talking about lol

While I think I can agree with some of your points, there are big ones that aren't even close to the mark.

1. Nintendo was already making good games in portable format, that's why handhelds were so popular. The goal of the PSP was to bring higher fidelity graphics to handheld, as history has shown from the 1980s to present: that very often works against having great games (I'd say the brief golden age of pre-rendered games like the DKC, FF7, and RE2 type games was probably the only time where this seemed to be the exception). It was Nintendo that advanced the gameplay possibilities by adding a touch screen. Nintendo was more successful.

2. The PSP was not only a Switch without Nintendo branding, it wasn't even the same type of console as the Switch. Switch is a hybrid with both a home console and handheld mode - it can double as a Wii-type home console, or SNES/NES style. PSP was an old fashioned handheld without even the advancements of the DS (let alone the Switch); it was more in line with the Gamegear and GBA with higher power.

3. The majority of devs made games for both the Wii and the DS, not one or the other. Nor was the Wii crappy, if it were, it wouldn't have sold 100m units and 1 billion pieces of retail software. It advanced in a better way for the 2006 market than the PS3 did. Granted, the gyroscopic Wii Motion+ had issues (I wasn't a big fan), but the earlier accelerometer and IR motion controls were great, and resulted in some of the most popular games of all time - killer app level (something neither PSP nor PS3 had with what Sony was doing that gen). In any case, I agree with you on the gyro controls of the Wii Motion+ era

On the gyro vs accelerometer games - look at what motion games Nintendo fans were playing and even still buying in 2017, almost a half a decade after the Wii - it wasn't the gyro games, but the accelerometer and IR games. The IR versions of games are still considered great to this day; IMO, they still work better than the Switch gyro-aiming. Although, I think the tech is mostly there now, particularly with some VR controllers - perhaps we'll see it in Switch 2.