The Ghost of RubangB said:
NYANKS said:
RolStoppable said:
NYANKS said:
This is true, but I also feel like people who choose to invest in handhelds care less, whether by simply expecting the same support from the past to continue or whatever. Do you need to a top tier team to put out many of the games that do well on handhelds? Not really. There are a lot of remakes, easy. Puzzle focused games, the friggin Imagine Series, tower defense games that would on consoles be a twenty dollar PSN game, etc. People generally expect less from handhelds, so the lack of mega dev team support isn't a big deal. Does anyone care the Santa Monica isn't doing Ghost of Sparta? No. So many big DS games, people here probably don't even know the actual devs, because they were outsourced. I mean, do you always need a AAA team to do the 146th port of Tetris?
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I wasn't talking about the types of games in my previous post, but the impact of individual titles. In other words, games that actually make people consider to buy the hardware. There's much more of them made for home consoles than handhelds. Remakes never reach the same sales level as a true sequel. The Imagine Series consists of dozens of different games and only a few of them crossed the million mark which isn't that big in this day and age of multimillion sellers.
Does anyone care that Santa Monica isn't doing Ghost of Sparta? Probably not, because as you said, most people don't know the actual developer of a specific game. But the PSP GoW aren't full entries in the series, they are merely sidestories. As a result they don't have the same impact as the home console games, not in software sales and also not in hardware moving capabilities. That's the problem handhelds in general are facing: they usually don't get the big games and the majority of gamers tends to go where the big games are. A quick example: Final Fantasy remakes on the DS sell okay, but Dragon Quest IX makes Japan go bonkers.
Handhelds have the advantage to sell to two or more people in the same household, yes. That's why they should routinely beat the home consoles in each generation in sales, right? But that didn't happen, so the great imbalance between handhelds and home consoles when it comes to big games has definitely been a huge advantage for home consoles in the past. A bigger advantage than what handhelds have over home consoles.
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So if handhelds are churning out an inferior product, how do you explain the sales? If they are cheaper, portable, and the games are not of the quality of consoles, to what do you attribute the success?
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This is the first generation in which the development costs of non-portable games increased beyond the point of no return, and now most developers can't afford to make non-portable games. This led to a huge shift in software development from non-portable consoles to portable consoles. This led to the hugest and most diverse software library belonging to the DS instead of any non-portable console.
Also, I think that past generations have led most gamers to expect experimental games and niche games on handhelds, while reserving home consoles for traditional, boring, AAA blockbuster sequels. The DS is getting both. Dragon Quest 9 on a handheld? People actually laughed when that was announced. And in the last 4 years, the Wii has only gotten a rail-shooter out of The Legend of Zelda, while the DS already got 2 whole Wind Waker sequels. The DS even got the first 2D Mario platformer in 15 or so years.
So while the software has been moving to handhelds because home systems are too expensive... that's not exactly the DS's fault. The rest of the industry did that to themselves. I think the DS's greatest success was marketing itself toward people who don't look down at portable gaming due to its lack of big budget AAA sequels. It sold itself with Nintendogs and Brain Age until everything else fell into place.
TL;DR
The big budget console business is slowly killing itself. They didn't just price themselves out of the competition for consumers; they priced themselves out of the competition for actual developers. The DS is expanding the market while picking up the pieces the old dying market is leaving behind.
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