I highly doubt there will be a console-less future, I honestly think that I in fact do not like playing portable games, I would always take the home console over it, but I have a lot of time traveling, and there's exclusives on handhelds, so there you go.
As far as handhelds being the main driver of sales and this industry as a whole, I can see that, because there's far more non-gamers who don't mind playing a quick game before a meeting, than there are gamers, who want substantial experiences as their outlet. I wouldn't be surprised if by some calculation, we're already there.
About Indie devs springing up while big studios are closing, that's not really a good thing for those smaller developers. The vast majority of them coming up now are kids who grew up playing SNES, Genesis, and Warcraft and wanted to make video games, now they're out of college with degrees and no job, so they join a professional organization, find a few friends, and form a "studio," and guess what the only viable platform is? iOS. The games are bad and so is the pay, they can barely afford to live, and either live off their wives (because let's face it, like engineering, males are the only ones who really want to do it) or better yet, their parents. We talk so much about the future, but look at the here and now, game development is an over-saturated employment field and handheld gaming is an over-saturated market.
I do feel like it may be able to bring about another golden age of RPG's or such, because I feel one of these studios who only has their product to go on is really going to put effort and creativity into a couple good games, and really make a name for itself, because all it can do is make good games. They don't have shareholders to answer to because they're a small LLC.
I like JACKAL's idea of a handheld that is a console, and I could see Sony doing it in the next 5-7 years. Playing Killzone 3 and looking at how far ahead the production values are, and knowing that the next generation games would have to spend enough money and time making a game look at least better than that, I can honestly say the next generation of home consoles is not coming, and whoever moves towards it first is going to crash. Instead we're going to keep seeing different things like Move and Kinect, and I think Jackal's ideal is going to be a part of that. I also think more phone are going to come out like the Xperia Play, where it has a d-pad and maybe 2-4 buttons. I could easily see the Play failing because it's Sony and they're just prone to fail with their pricey, futuristic hardware no one can afford or utilize fully, so I can see a different phone manufacturer doing it, maybe with windows 7 and some kind of Xbox Live functionality.
And lastly, yes, when we have contact lenses or brain implants that display virtual reality for us, reality is smurfed. But then again everyone in the 60's thought we would have flying cars 10 years ago, it's never the technology we predict that comes to fruition, only the stuff that has the right amount of practicality, novelty, and appears at the right time to be used by the right consumers.
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Originally Posted by Iceglow
