Poll: Smarphones vs. handhelds

[esserin]

I've seen a lot of people say that nintendo's dominance over the handheld market is going to die soon enough due to the rise of smartphones.
But, with the way the market currently is, I find that unlikely.

They may both be about making portable games but that is the only similarity. Mobile games are, in general, cheap bite-sized chunks of entertainment that rely on "whales", people that buy LOTS of freemium content, to make the money needed to keep their head above water.

Handheld games, on the other hand, come packed with content. They rely only the purchasing price of the game to turn in a profit. Plus, they actually have systems in place to allow people to find whatever game they want (Reviews and what not). I've yet to see a full review dedicated to a mobile game (Usually, it's a list of stuff on the mobile.) And the search system for finding games on smartphones is basically utter crap.

Because of all that, I'd like to think why anyone might believe that smartphones could successfully replace handhelds.

Edit: Aaarrghh, I've got a typo in one of the poll options. How do I fix this travesty?!?

 

[Bad Jim]

I don't think handhelds will die either. They are better gaming devices with better games. Mobile gaming mainly caters to people that don't want to carry an extra gaming device. But if you play a lot you kinda need a second device or your battery will die and you won't be able to make calls.

 

[Smooth Operator]

If mobile manufacturers would tighten their shit up for gaming they would be a serious contender to wipe everyone else off the board, their versatility and incredibly steep hardware improvements would make them the only sensible choice.

But right now they are only concerned with who has the most pixels and the best ifart/twitcher/faceass/geolocationspam integration, and their gaming section is just a hustlers breeding ground.
You can hardly build something viable for legitimate developers with priorities like that.

 

[Hairless Mammoth]

Handhelds still have two advantages for the players. The games are expensive to make, so quality, both gameplaywise and technical, is on average much higher than mobile games. No one will buy a game that everyone says is complete garbage. Since both handhelds have actual fuckin' buttons, the games also don't use gimmicky or shoddy touch controls for the entire control scheme. The developers usually properly utilize the touch screens, instead of relying on them for the basics. (There's also the benefit of not draining your phone's battery.)

The mobile game market is big, yes. Although, thanks to how cheap and easy it is to make games for Android, and to a lesser extent, iOS, the market's selection is also saturated with shite. There are tons of clones of decent or terrible games. Because of the demographics publishers aim for, the ease of getting them to work on many hardware variations, and the controls, cheap little puzzle games are really popular. Many of those games also hold extra playtime ransom for money or mandatory wait times. A handheld owner can avoid all of that.

The Vita might be discontinued within the next couple, and Sony might not bother with another handheld. But, Nintendo still dominates anything that is a full game system powered by a battery.

Only if a phone with a good physical button layout came out and became popular would Nintendo be under a major threat. Sony tried that and failed with the Xperia Play (mostly because their phones cost too much, compared to the competition) and sort of tried again with the Vita's touch screen and ARM CPU. Other phone makers don't care enough about the small demographic that will buy that kind of phone.

 

[sanquin]

If Nintento decided to release a nintendo phone I would seriously consider buying it... I really dislike mobile games, and generally don't see the fun in them. But a phone that would accept nintendo handheld cartridges, with actual buttons to play...that would be so awesome.

 

[Elvis Starburst]

Considering the level of quality of some of the handheld games compared to mobile games, no. Yes, there are quality mobile titles, and low quality shit on handhelds. But, I think they're two very, very different worlds. And with that in mind, I don't see either of them crushing the other. Phone games have their place, especially with those (Like me) who get bored and need to pass two minutes with a slightly satisfying game of... Whatever you're playing. Sometimes hand held games aren't so easy to pass those few small minutes. I just pull up Bejewelled Blitz and it's good enough.

I'm not even going to get into the control scheme issues, or the HUGE over-abundance of micro-transactions. I doubt either of those are going away any time soon, so I feel that's more than enough, combined with the games market for handhelds, to keep them afloat

 

[Fieldy409_v1legacy]

If mobile devs got their act together and put out more things like infinity blade they would.

You don't have to charge $1 for your game or make the mobile game free to play guys! That's not a law.

If I had Pokemon on my phone I would never look at a handheld again!

 

[Bob_McMillan]

When smartphone companies finally get tired of pumping out bigger, shinier, more expensive phones, I'm pretty sure they will realize the huge opportunities they missed by not giving mobile games more priority. A simple controller addon that doesn't completely suck would kill it out there. This would take a lot of effort from the smartphone companies, game devs, and the consumers to be succesful. It will take a really long time, but it will happen eventually. Of course, that's assuming that handhelds won't improve or innovate. For all we know, Sony is planning to compress a console into something that can fit in your palm but still do everything a console does. Then the handheld market would just merge with the console market, and smartphones will sort of replace handhelds as the cheaper alternative to consoles. OR smartphones, consoles, PCs, handhelds, and dildoes fuse into one single XboxOne-esque amalgamation. OR the gaming industry collapses and we all go back to being peasants. Who knows?

 

[Yopaz]

No, I don't think the handhelds will ever be taken over by the smart phone market.

Smart phones are simply too good at doing everything. I can use my phone to get on the bus since it stores my ticket, I can use it to navigate using its GPS function and if I don't manage to find my way even after that I can use it do email, text, send a Facebook message or (shockingly) call someone who knows the way. The hardware is good enough to play some amazing games, but the battery life limits what I can do whenever I am out. Now my handheld's battery will also run out if I play for more than 6 hours, so what's the difference?

Well, if my phone runs out of power I can't use all the functions that I might have an actual need for and not be able to use the thousands of functions of my phone. If my 3DS runs out of battery then I will have to deal with being bored. I can also turn my 3DS off to conserve power, but it would be stupid to turn off my phone. I have a phone so people can reach me so I should keep it nearby at all times and it should have sufficient power to accept calls and messages. So unless they decide to do something with the battery life to prevent this from being a problem I don't see it happening.

 

[Phlap]

Eventually we'll see them merge. Expect "gaming phones" to start becoming more popular within the decade.

 

[loa]

I put an emulator to play links awakening on my phone and nope.
Touchscreens are no replacements for directional pads and I don't see those going away any time soon.
You need to feel when you press right and where up is, else you'll be doing stuff like touching right+up constantly and you will die and go mad.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Smartphones are greatly limited by their control scheme. The fact that everything is touch based and you lack any kind of buttons or any real tactile feedback makes it difficult to make any kind of action oriented games work well on them.

Another problem is battery life. If you run out of power playing a 3DS or a Vita it isn't a big deal, at most you might have forgotten to save and lost some progress. If you run out of power because you were playing on your phone then that's a big problem because you've lost the ability to call or text anyone, not great. At the moment since phone games aren't particularly complicated and people don't play them for very long battery life isn't as much of an issue, but if people are going to be trying to game on their phones for an hour or more at a time then it becomes a huge problem.

So yeah, it's probably best to just have separate devices.

 

[Maximum Bert]

Cant see it unless those who make phones really concentrate on gaming and I dont see that being a huge concern to them atm. Most people dont buy a smartphone to game I mean why would you there are far superior gaming handhelds at a fraction of the price with far superior games on them. They game on their phone because they can most arent interested in what they are playing as anything other than a quick time sink. Theres a reason the markets saturated with free to play junk and thats because most of the market who use phones dont want to pay up front for a game those that do almost invariably have a handheld or home console anyway and will likely get it on that if there is a choice.

 

[Doom972]

It's just a matter of time. Android games keep getting better and a lot of them have gamepad support. The fact that you can play a lot of classics on it due to emulation also gives it an edge over current handhelds. I think that eventually smartphones will replace handhelds like they replaced MP3 players.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I think it's a possibility, sure. I think handhelds are closer to becoming mobile phones than the other way around though.

 

[Hero of Lime]

Considering Smartphones have become one of the biggest products in recent years, and gaming handhelds still sell well, I think dedicated systems are still a viable product. Plus, as others have already said, they are two very different markets to begin with.

 

[Signa]

I play both, and while smartphone gaming has some nice gems, I don't think it comes close to what we had on average during the Game Boy generation. Sure, you get color and proper processing power, but the best games just rely on taps and swipes, which severely limits what a person can do to play a game. Physical buttons are crucial to playing games.

 

[Scarim Coral]

I say not yet seeing how the smartphone still got some disavantage to a handheld-

Some game played on your smartphone will pretty much overheat when playing for long.

Just like PC, having alot of games in your pc will clutter its performance unless it's a gaming made pc and pretty much all smartphone are made for calling for people.

Also depending on the game, some games don't transist well onto a smarphone due to its touchscreen like some FPS smartphone game.

 

[kasperbbs]

Smartphones have terrible controls for anything more complex than angry birds or jewels and most of it's library is garbage and copies of that same garbage, so no, i don't think that it's gonna replace anything. Those are two different things as far as i'm concerned, unless some smartphone hybrid like xperia play comes along and somehow sticks around for a while, but seeing how they like to release new versions of their phones every year or even sooner even thats unlikely because who buys a console every year..?

 

[Fieldy409_v1legacy]

Something I think when people mention smart phone games not being good without buttons. Smartphones seem to be getting bigger, wider screens lately. There's plenty of phones out there that could devote a little space to a virtual set of buttons akin to a gamebpy detour and still have plenty of room for the game.