rocketpig said:
mrstickball said:
@Vagabond - Your analysis of the Smartphone/Handheld war is exactly why I'm always rushing in and putting out there that NGP/3DS are in hot water. Having been a DS owner and lower-end Android owner, I find it impossible to go back to wanting to buy a new 3DS or more DS games, given that in a year or two, I will have pretty much any type of game I want at a fraction of the price. My entire Android library cost me about $20, and I've probably put 250 hours into it (Zenonia, Game Dev Story, SNESoid, GENSoid, and Robo Tower Defense). When you have a value proposition like that, its hard to imagine why people wouldn't start considering the smartphone as a primary game device.
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When Apple released the App Store in 2008, I thought it was a game-changer. It was impossible to deny how awesome it was (I bought my iPhone in late 2007, I think). By 2009, the iPhone was all I carried around. The DS received occasional play but the PSP was in a closet, never (literally, I mean never) to emerge again.
Flash forward to 2011. I now own a 4.3" HTC Inspire and I cannot see myself buying another handheld gaming device again. I just won't play it.
A lot of people around here don't want to see their precious handhelds diminish in any way but the writing is written in story-high lettering on the wall. Handhelds won't disappear but we'll never see another Nintendo DS success story again. The ship has sailed.
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I think that the biggest impedament to the future of handhelds may not be poor sales, but the opportunity for companies like Sony, MS, and Nintendo to make their games available to vastly larger userbases. Sony has the right idea with the Xperia which, to my knowledge, has sold very well relative to smartphones. Couple a good video game handset idea with a smartphone, and I think you could have something that could reach great success.
As I've been saying, I think Nintendo will come to a point that they have no chance of selling ~10 million copies of a new Super Mario iteration, and may take the plunge to make the title available on phones, and will wind up selling more copies than they ever had before.
Sales data wise, smartphone games are starting to get decent valuation. Due to the massive number of titles, its hard to have all titles do well, but the top titles are really starting to see good sales. AAA titles that are well made are seeing very strong returns , and incredible legs in terms of how long they are relevant on the market. For example, the 4 year old port of Final Fantasy III from DS broke in the top 20 in March. Infinity Blade has, in four months, already broken into the top 10 highest-grossing games of all time on iOS. One can only imagine what kind of success developers will have when there are more smartphone users, because we're really at the start of the Smartphone gaming revolution. And if we're seeing this kind of success (Flurry Analytics believes that iOS and Android controlled about 35% of portable gaming revenue in 2010) today, what happens when there are 4 or 5 times the number of users with smartphones? At that point, we'll be looking at smartphone titles outselling most historical DS titles by pretty fair margins.
For example, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars has nearly outsold the DS version and has surpassed the PSP version. What happens when a title like that sells 4x as many copies due to the larger user base?
