I wasn't arguing that they are the end of the handheld market. What I am arguing though is that it is entirely possible we will see sales of dedicated handhelds start to fall now that they aren't the only game in town. Especially when you consider that the casual market was what was really driving a lot of those sales over the years. The DS was popular sure, but it was casual game sales that drove it once the Lite and games like Brain Age were released (I trout you not, looking at the quarterly sales for all regions on Wikipedia, total sales for the DS more than doubled in the last half of 2006 alone. The DS Lite was released in North America and Europe in June, and Brain Age in April of that year). Even my parents bought DS's for those sorts of titles and they are not gamers. They also now have iPhones and the like instead, which they're already going to buy and own anyway without taking games into account. Casual gamers are what made the DS sell as well as it did, largely because now there was a handheld with a dirt simple control scheme that even my mom could use without freaking out, and simpler games aimed at that audience were released in abundance. The same thing happened with the Wii as well. The difference being that 5+ years ago there was nothing else for that market. But now a lot of them have smart phones anyway, so why pay more for a handheld when they already take that everywhere and the games are cheaper?Originally Posted by Loony BoB
Yeah, but again, that's people like us, not the casual market they tapped into almost by accident with the DS. There's a reason that despite selling around 80 million Wii's and 150 million DS's, games like Mario Galaxy and Zelda, while they sell well, don't sell any better than AAA games on other consoles with smaller user bases, and don't even come close to things like Wii Fit or Brain Age, and certainly don't compare to the uptake rate of things like Farmville and Angry Birds. The casual gaming market in general doesn't care about Nintendo's long standing fanchises. They want shorter, simpler games that they can play in short play sessions then put down. This is especially true of gaming on handheld devices. Something they can already get on their phone which is convenient since they already carry that all the time anyway, for less money, and without any real dip in quality.No, but they do care what games they get, and Nintendo make a large number of the games that many people feel are "must have" games. I don't see Nintendo selling the exclusive rights to Pokémon, Mario or Zelda.
I never tried to claim otherwise. But again, that's a type of game that doesn't matter to a lot of the people who bought the Wii and the DS. I wouldn't be surprised if with this handheld generation we see Sony gain massive amounts of ground, or even overtake Nintendo entirely and not just because of a lackluster launch (in all honesty, as bad as the launch was, they've corrected most of the problems months ago, and with Nintendo's habit of releasing new versions of handhelds there's no reason to believe that one bad launch will keep them from recovering). I honestly think that casual gamers are not going to see as much value in a dedicated handheld anymore when they can get the game experience that they want on a phone. I also think you underestimate just how much this market may have driven DS sales. If they jump ship to the next new thing (and there's no reason to believe they won't), I don't think Nintendo will be as successful in the handheld market as last time.Complex handheld games are not successful on phones yet. They will probably be later on, but I just don't see this happening before another generation flows through.
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