Are hand helds dead?

Cellphone vs. handheld gaming device sales is an odd comparison to make. Cellphones are all-purpose devices that most people want/need. Gaming handhelds are dedicated gadgets that only a certain portion of cellphone buyers will want. Therefore, comparing the two is like comparing dedicated camera sales vs. cellphones. Smaller camera sales don't necessarily spell doom and gloom.

Furthermore, dedicated handhelds trend towards a younger audience. I say this since most of us are probably between 18 and 20-something and question handheld longevity because we don't play them as much as we used to. I don't, but I did when I was a younger teenager/a kid. I'm not saying that handhelds are only for kids, but that just because we aren't playing them as much anymore doesn't mean that there isn't a large crop of younger kids that are picking them up, just as there probably are with every handheld gaming device.

I still like hand held portables. My thumbs are like freakin' big toes on small devices like the touch and my own phone the Nexus One. I don't like large phones. So here's to hoping they don't go away any time soon.

*looks at her Vita, looks at her PC and then back to the Vita*

I got this at launch. I have about 6 games for it. Maybe if they released games all over the world at the same time rather then make it 5 months or never at all till it comes out here, id play it more. Ragnarok isn't coming. Persona is miles away now and i feel like the only company fully behind it is Capcom and that just feels odd. The PSP had the style of launch and yes, its muted and hidden behind a lot of whispers of a failed product but i kinda think that maybe handhelds are only "dead" in the way that no one wants to publish for them anymore and there isn't enough "big named games" compared to the other markets. When Persona 4, a remake of a stellar RPG is being touted as your system seller, you need to REALLY bring out something better fast. Seriously. :( *sad girl who spent so much on a paperweight*

@banishedsoul1 said:

@MAGZine said:

So, OP attempts to make the argument that handhelds are dead because they smartphones "cost about the same" and "do as much as a desktop PC".

False, and false.

A 3DS sells for $169. A Galaxy S III Sells for $169 on a 3 year contract. 3 * 12 * $60/mo = $2160. What a steal!

Don't compare smartphones to desktop PCs. what a ridiculous statement. Are you playing Call of Duty on your smartphone? Are you even playing Lego Batman on your smartphone? What an awful argument.

The gaming experience on smartphones suck. Your smartphone, believe it or not, is not primarily a gaming platform. There are several issues that stem from this:

• Poor Battery Life
• Poor controls (touch and gyro only)
• inconsistancy of hardware is a nightmare for game developers
• smartphone games are designed for short bursts of play. Play for a few minutes, quit, play or do something else.
• Your smartphone is a phone so if you kill the battery on your smartphone playing games, you no longer have a phone. So what, you're going to plug it in? Yeah, really portable.

There aren't really very many serious game developers looking to tell any sort of a story or invest in any sort of a game with any complexity past McPixel, Granny Smith or Angry Birds. Games designed for portable gamesystems generally have better gameplay, and gameplay that is conductive to longer playsessions. You might only pay $2.99 for a game on your phone, but if you play it for only a couple hours, how does it stack up against a pokemon game that you invested 40 hours into? You get what you pay for.

And that image you posted is a fucking autrocity. Nobody is going to carry that as a phone, and there aren't enough of those in existence to make it worth while to develop a game with hardware controls in mind.

Terrible argument. Terrible.

poor battery life? you mean like 3-5 hours on 3ds is good? you can use blu tooth controllers with android devices. Oh and yes you can pretty much do anything on a smart phone as a pc. Unless we are talking about heavy duty rendering or something there is an app for it. Omg i can't play call of duty whats a loss.

Why am I even bothering?

The last I checked, smartphones have abysmal batterylife when playing games. Like battery life similar to a 3DS. Except--again--when you kill the battery on your smartphone you no longer have a PHONE. Doesn't that seem sort of important to you? The device inherently limits how long your playsessions can be. B/T Android controllers are moot because nobody has them, and nobody is going to carry that around with their phone. Will never have a large enough install base.

As for "you can do anything with a smartphone as a PC," well... if you think that is even remotely true, then I'll have to be done arguing, because as far as I see it, no argument I make, no matter how solid and detailed, is going to be (supposedly) refuted by some dumb point that makes no sense (like this one that a smartphone can do anything a PC can do).

Stop being ridiculous.

@Daneian said:

I hope not! I just picked up my first Neo Geo pocket Color!

Good buy. Get The Last Blade.

Are consoles dead? PC's can do everything consoles can, they can be used for a lot more and you can pick up far more games, for far cheaper.

I don't see smartphones killing off handhelds, any more than Facebook/web browser games will kill off Steam. They're different markets, even if they intersect.

@Wong_Fei_Hung: The only sale I'm seeing on ebay is $85 for a new copy of the Japanese version. Any idea if the NGPC is region locked?

@aurahack said:

@believer258 said:

But then:

This is fairly new.

That phone is a chunk of shit, though. Certainly better than the N-Gage in terms of "I can actually hold this and use it and not look like an asylum escapee" but its performance is awful. :|

So you got my point then.

Seriously, stop making these threads.

@MAGZine said:

@banishedsoul1 said:

@MAGZine said:

So, OP attempts to make the argument that handhelds are dead because they smartphones "cost about the same" and "do as much as a desktop PC".

False, and false.

A 3DS sells for $169. A Galaxy S III Sells for $169 on a 3 year contract. 3 * 12 * $60/mo = $2160. What a steal!

Don't compare smartphones to desktop PCs. what a ridiculous statement. Are you playing Call of Duty on your smartphone? Are you even playing Lego Batman on your smartphone? What an awful argument.

The gaming experience on smartphones suck. Your smartphone, believe it or not, is not primarily a gaming platform. There are several issues that stem from this:

• Poor Battery Life
• Poor controls (touch and gyro only)
• inconsistancy of hardware is a nightmare for game developers
• smartphone games are designed for short bursts of play. Play for a few minutes, quit, play or do something else.
• Your smartphone is a phone so if you kill the battery on your smartphone playing games, you no longer have a phone. So what, you're going to plug it in? Yeah, really portable.

There aren't really very many serious game developers looking to tell any sort of a story or invest in any sort of a game with any complexity past McPixel, Granny Smith or Angry Birds. Games designed for portable gamesystems generally have better gameplay, and gameplay that is conductive to longer playsessions. You might only pay $2.99 for a game on your phone, but if you play it for only a couple hours, how does it stack up against a pokemon game that you invested 40 hours into? You get what you pay for.

And that image you posted is a fucking autrocity. Nobody is going to carry that as a phone, and there aren't enough of those in existence to make it worth while to develop a game with hardware controls in mind.

Terrible argument. Terrible.

poor battery life? you mean like 3-5 hours on 3ds is good? you can use blu tooth controllers with android devices. Oh and yes you can pretty much do anything on a smart phone as a pc. Unless we are talking about heavy duty rendering or something there is an app for it. Omg i can't play call of duty whats a loss.

Why am I even bothering?

The last I checked, smartphones have abysmal batterylife when playing games. Like battery life similar to a 3DS. Except--again--when you kill the battery on your smartphone you no longer have a PHONE. Doesn't that seem sort of important to you? The device inherently limits how long your playsessions can be. B/T Android controllers are moot because nobody has them, and nobody is going to carry that around with their phone. Will never have a large enough install base.

As for "you can do anything with a smartphone as a PC," well... if you think that is even remotely true, then I'll have to be done arguing, because as far as I see it, no argument I make, no matter how solid and detailed, is going to be (supposedly) refuted by some dumb point that makes no sense (like this one that a smartphone can do anything a PC can do).

Stop being ridiculous.

Yes a smart phone can do pretty much any task a desktop can do. Other then work station stuff, it can do everything. That's one reason why people spend 60$ a month so they can get super fast LTE speeds on their phones. Why would they spend all this money if it can't do anything? I can't think of one thing a smart phone can't do that a pc can. i can take photos and edit them and upload them on my phone. I can e mail,facebook,web surf and so on. i can skype on my phone even run Ubuntu on one. Battery life depends on the phone don't lie and act like all phones have bad battery life. 3ds and vita have awful battery life so they have no right to smart phones off.

They died after the original Game Boy.

JK

They will never return back to the game boy days for sure
Not sure that there with be another playstation portable but im sure the 3ds is really profitable even though it's not selling as well as the ds did

Hell no, in fact they're supposedly releasing a new Neo Geo in December.

If anything, the market seems to be expanding.

@banishedsoul1 said:

@MAGZine said:

@banishedsoul1 said:

@MAGZine said:

So, OP attempts to make the argument that handhelds are dead because they smartphones "cost about the same" and "do as much as a desktop PC".

False, and false.

A 3DS sells for $169. A Galaxy S III Sells for $169 on a 3 year contract. 3 * 12 * $60/mo = $2160. What a steal!

Don't compare smartphones to desktop PCs. what a ridiculous statement. Are you playing Call of Duty on your smartphone? Are you even playing Lego Batman on your smartphone? What an awful argument.

The gaming experience on smartphones suck. Your smartphone, believe it or not, is not primarily a gaming platform. There are several issues that stem from this:

• Poor Battery Life
• Poor controls (touch and gyro only)
• inconsistancy of hardware is a nightmare for game developers
• smartphone games are designed for short bursts of play. Play for a few minutes, quit, play or do something else.
• Your smartphone is a phone so if you kill the battery on your smartphone playing games, you no longer have a phone. So what, you're going to plug it in? Yeah, really portable.

There aren't really very many serious game developers looking to tell any sort of a story or invest in any sort of a game with any complexity past McPixel, Granny Smith or Angry Birds. Games designed for portable gamesystems generally have better gameplay, and gameplay that is conductive to longer playsessions. You might only pay $2.99 for a game on your phone, but if you play it for only a couple hours, how does it stack up against a pokemon game that you invested 40 hours into? You get what you pay for.

And that image you posted is a fucking autrocity. Nobody is going to carry that as a phone, and there aren't enough of those in existence to make it worth while to develop a game with hardware controls in mind.

Terrible argument. Terrible.

poor battery life? you mean like 3-5 hours on 3ds is good? you can use blu tooth controllers with android devices. Oh and yes you can pretty much do anything on a smart phone as a pc. Unless we are talking about heavy duty rendering or something there is an app for it. Omg i can't play call of duty whats a loss.

Why am I even bothering?

The last I checked, smartphones have abysmal batterylife when playing games. Like battery life similar to a 3DS. Except--again--when you kill the battery on your smartphone you no longer have a PHONE. Doesn't that seem sort of important to you? The device inherently limits how long your playsessions can be. B/T Android controllers are moot because nobody has them, and nobody is going to carry that around with their phone. Will never have a large enough install base.

As for "you can do anything with a smartphone as a PC," well... if you think that is even remotely true, then I'll have to be done arguing, because as far as I see it, no argument I make, no matter how solid and detailed, is going to be (supposedly) refuted by some dumb point that makes no sense (like this one that a smartphone can do anything a PC can do).

Stop being ridiculous.

Yes a smart phone can do pretty much any task a desktop can do. Other then work station stuff, it can do everything. That's one reason why people spend 60$ a month so they can get super fast LTE speeds on their phones. Why would they spend all this money if it can't do anything? I can't think of one thing a smart phone can't do that a pc can. i can take photos and edit them and upload them on my phone. I can e mail,facebook,web surf and so on. i can skype on my phone even run Ubuntu on one. Battery life depends on the phone don't lie and act like all phones have bad battery life. 3ds and vita have awful battery life so they have no right to smart phones off.

Good luck using photoshop on youre smartphone, or reading a pdf that has more then 2 pages, or watching a video comfortably, or playing any game that requires even a small amount of processing power, or using the internet in a practical manner. If you use a desktop just for checking youre email and facebook then you might be right though, but smarthpones are inferior to a desktop in every way save phonecalls. ( imo )

Also playing something simple like angry birds will kill my battery in under 1hour 30. And thats if i were to use it just for that game, no internet on and the screen on low brightness. And its not a crappy smarthphone.

For my personal tastes, not by a long shot. I can't believe how many games I've enjoyed on the PSP (and still purchasing games for it to date) in comparison to PS3/360/Wii this gen. I just dig the approach to handheld gaming design, not even mentioning portability.

For the mass market, probably so. I'd call it more of a large niche. Vita's misfortunes are unfortunate, but the 3DS worldwide is doing well. I think that there will always be a market for dedicated handhelds in some capacity.

3DS is selling just fine, and Vita is having problems because of the price and the lack of high profile games.

The handheld market is just fine.

@Ravenlight said:

Seriously, stop making these threads.

are hand helds dead threads dead?