Despite Japan clearly diminishing its importance in the global videogame industry, some people (including famous Malstrom haha) say the country might still be the future of gaming trends, at least some of them.

In this case, talking about handhelds and home consoles...I guess everyone here is aware of how home consoles are becoming more and more marginalized in Japan.

Now, when talking about the DS...the DS outsells all other systems evrywhere, however in the West home consoles still play a very big part, unlike in Japan....eventually, do you expect handhelds to REALLY start taking over in the West as well?...I don´t necessarily mean in the next gen, but eventually, 10-15 years from now, could we see this "Japanese scenario" in the West?

There's one significant difference in most other countries; we allow plenty of immigrants. Here in Ireland we have many thousands of Poles arrived in the last few years (10% of our pop are fairly recent immigrants), which have slowed our decline in Catholicism among other things.

So I don't think Japan is as much a predictor as Malstrom does (his belief is based on pop decline).

Poles=European Union. Are you an immigrant if you go to England ? Ofourse they arrived in the last few years because before that they were not allowed to come to Irland. And Poles have some special releationship to UK and neighbors. Dont know why.


But nevertheless Japan is different then Europe or US.Because first they have small flats. Really small so they rather go outside then stay at home. And Japanese people spend a lot of time in subway at work school or trains. So ofcourse handhelds are a substitute for Home Consoles for them. This Trend will probably rise a little in western countrys too. But still wont be as strong as in Japan.

Yes I would be an immigrant, I would have migrated in, which is the definition of an immigrant. And if the UK was getting significant amounts of Irish immigrants, it would affect their population and reduce any possible population decline. Pop decline is the basis for Malstrom's position, he thinks we will all have it soon enough.

Ok you are right with the term, But we have to see Europe as one whole so the migration between European Countrys is not relevant because the population of the whole market stays the same. But on the other hand Europe gets immigrants from outside too so the population is really growing. I did not know that because here we have a gaint decline and we have even programms which gives money to people if they get children.

I think the Japanese way is the future, kind of.

I am pretty sure the future of consoles will be one that does both.

By that I mean a handheld console that can be connected to a TV/projector or whatever to play games.

All the non-gaming stuff that say, the x360 does like netflix, sky and whatever will be present in pretty much all standard tvs by then.

My mate got a samsung (i think it's a samsung) tv recently and the online stuff it does is amazing.

Firmware updates can make it do everything a console does apart from games and dvd/br.

It made me release all this talk of MS\sony wanting to take over the living room is rubbish as TVs are now well capable of doing all the extras.

Eventually game consoles will go full circle and go back to what they started out as. Game consoles.

nope, unless there is a fundamental change in how other countries work i don't see this happening. Japan likes handhelds for a reason, because they don't spend much time at the house, many people spending 2-3 hours a day riding trains with nothing to do.

^^so why not a handheld console that does both?

Where in the world would anyone not want that?

you mean a handheld that you plug into your tv?  That will probably be the future of gaming, but that's 2-3 gens away.  They will probably have alike a base for the handheld that plugs into the tv, uses a controller and has a hard drive in it.  As long as there is a huge difference between the capabilities of handhelds and consoles this will not happen though. 

I don't think so i prefer home consoles over handhelds.