Smartphones were supposed to kill off portable consoles and for a brief moment they did. It took 2-3 years until people realized dedicated hardware was so much better and Switch happened to launch at perfect time.
Well, we’ve now got Steam Deck turning your portable console into a full PC, just connect a keyboard. Also no need to buy a Steam Deck version of that game you bought on Steam ten years ago, it’s already there and probably runs great.
It might be that proprietary, single purpose gaming portables are going to lose to more flexible portables even if smartphones are too limited to do the job.
long response sorry
I think smartphones could have done a massive amount of damage to consoles and ultimately will occupy a large section of gaming as they should.
This has been forgotten and it shouldn’t, but mobile gaming really wasn’t a business movement to transfer existing video game development practices to a mobile environment, it was a business movement to apply corporate business practices to gaming. Mobile gaming wasn’t ever given a fair chance because there has always been a huge headwind of money shaping the mobile gaming industry into the toxic shithole it is.
Not to mention the Apple and (more so) Google app stores have never valued creating reliable game suggestions and review databases that people actually trusted. Neither has either company given a shit about encouraging a cottage industry of mobile game critics, instead they have pretended like people are seriously going to keep looking for new games through the recommendations of an algorithm that is so obviously tuned to spit out crap and point you at the same old couple of popular slot machine microtransaction games over and over again.
If you forget all that nonsense though and take a look at games like Call Of Duty Mobile, Farlight 84 and Pubg Newstate, touchscreen interfaces are getting extremely good for shooters and many mobile players have gotten extremely good at creating custom arrangements of buttons so they can use three or four fingers to play almost competitively as the average mouse and keyboard player (farrrr better than a controller player without gyro).
Games like Call Of Duty Mobile and the now maddeningly defunct Apex Legends Mobile also allow the use of a controller hooked up via Bluetooth to your phone. Using an xbox x/s controller and the PowerA Moga gaming clip 2 you can mount your phone on your controller in a very sturdy fashion. You can then turn gyro input on your phone on too (which is normally for touchscreen users directly holding their phone). In this way I was able to aim in Apex Legends Mobile without auto-aim far more competitively than someone playing normal Apex Legends on console could do with a controller and no gyro even if they had auto-aim turned on.
This clip only costs about $17, so that with a used Xbox x/s controller for let’s say $35 gets you the ability to comfortably play Wreckfest on your phone anywhere in your house with your phones beautiful AMOLED screen at a close enough distance to give you a high fidelity viewing experience. The clip also easily pops off and can be stored in a pocket.
You can’t argue the potential of mobile gaming especially if people continue to buy phones with fairly powerful processors and high quality screens. Sure I love gaming on a computer or a console, but those cost money and most people only need to drop <$50 on some peripherals to game with their phone. I game on a steamdeck and I am satisfied with that right now but in many ways the balance of my phone in a moga clip was better and anyways everybody already has a phone so it was dead easy to wrangle friends in on actually good mobile games.
The problem is all the business/corporate bros in mobile gaming are keeping the industry from innovating or really even just replicating the experience of normal gaming because they have been hellbent on enshittifying mobile gaming from the start.
We would ALL own Diablo Mobile if it was actually a phenomenal Diablo game that we could play with any friends we wanted and was satisfying to control on mobile. Blizzard just catastrophically shit the bed and made people feel icky for participating in this corporatization of gaming.
Made a comment in another thread the other day, but as a gamesir x2 pro owner the telescopic controllers are really good now too.
I got the USBC one so no input delay or battery to recharge, cost me $100AUD, built solid and there are mod guides out there now (I’m gonna add a 30mm fan or two to keep my phone cool it can get a bit hot under heavy load.
Isn’t it amazing this capability was basically right there from the beginning of mobile gaming?
It really shows badly corporate business practices utterly destroyed the ability of mobile gaming to innovate and improve as a medium for years and years. We might as well be almost 10 years behind where we should be in the evolution of the mobile gaming scene and it is honestly appalling.
I am so glad we have options like your gamesir x2! I use an Xbox controller just because I already had one, actually for awhile I was using a wired Xbox 360 controller which would sometimes work for games that weren’t even designed with controller input because compatibility is so good with 360 controllers lol.
How do you like the joysticks and buttons on the gamesir?
It’s just not the same market, might as well say that smartphones are killing tabletop gaming. DS lifetime sales were 155m, Switch is at something like 140m and still going. There’s not that much room for growth probably but smartphone gaming is saturated as well.
The comment about killing a market came from you; phones are, as I said, the most popular device for gaming. Likening video gaming to tabletop gaming is silly and irrelevant; phones can and do play the same games which consoles do, board games are not the same market or sphere.
Billions use their phones for games, the Switch accounts for over a hundred million consoles, which are essentially large phones/tablets with controllers. It depends what you mean about dedicated hardware, as there are phones which are more powerful. If it’s based on the controllers, sure, although there are also pads which can connect to mobile devices to make them into little consoles in themselves.
I’m not sure what you mean by smartphone gaming saturation; in terms of how many phones have been sold and who has them? I guess. But the market for mobile games is absolutely huge because of how many exist, so you have a potential market of billions rather than millions.
Yes, DS sales were, and now it’s dead. The Switch is Nintendo’s only console yet has not picked up the slack. It should be doing Wii + DS numbers, not under the latter.
I can’t believe we’re talking about this again. Feels like every five years or so, some industry has-been wants to talk about phones changing gaming.
Last year was one of the best for games in recent years, all of which I wouldn’t want to play on my phone.
Wake up, Touchscreens aren’t ideal, it’s just convenient. The market is bigger than just people wanting to play on the phone.
EDIT I reread and think my rant isn’t really applicable to this, but I’ll leave up how I feel anyway.
What the world needs right now is Steam boxes. Just build a $500 PC, slap Steam OS on it and you’re done. The ecosystem is already there. I really don’t understand why nobody has done this.
They did try this a while back, steam machines were around at 2015. I could see it getting a rebirth in a similar design to the steam deck in a few years though.
Steam OS and big picture weren’t very mature yet at the time. I think now that the Deck has proven the UX, they could definitely revisit this idea. And I pray that they do because it could mean more Steam controllers on the market
Seriously, I ordered a steam controller right before they were discontinued, and got a refund :(
Ah yes, the steam machines. Combining the downsides of PC and Consoles since 2015.
Have you been living under a rock for the past three years? Have you heard of the Steam Deck?
Which is a device that combines the downsides of an UMPC and a handheld game console?
I have.
Can you build something like that for the same price as a higher end console? These consoles are designed to be loss leaders so it’s hard to beat if you just focus on the hardware price.
Yes you can. You can build a PC with a RX7600 CPU for about $600. That’s about in the same performance ballpark as a PS5. If you mass produce those and trim down some features, you’ll be able to hit $500. And you won’t have to pay the Microsoft tax. Sadly, this is also why it’s not happening. I’m 100% sure MS are furiously working behind the scenes to prevent anyone from coming out with a system like this.
Though, caveat, the PS5 has been out for a few years. At the time it was introduced, I imagine it would have been more competitive.
Also, I don’t think that the term @nanoUFO@sh.itjust.works is looking for is “loss leader”. I believe that he’s referring to the fact that the console is sold at a loss, while the console vendor – who has monopoly control over the platform – forces game prices up and extracts some of the money that game developers make. That’s a different pricing strategy from use of a “loss leader” albeit with certain similarities; in the “loss leader” strategy, purchase of the sold-below-cost item isn’t normally tied directly to sale of other products. I’d call this the razor-and-blades pricing strategy:
googles
Yeah. Wikipedia even uses console video game pricing as an explicit example in the first paragraph, including mentioning the distinction from a loss-leader strategy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_and_blades_model
The razor and blades business model[1] is a business model in which one item is sold at a low price (or given away for free) in order to increase sales of a complementary good, such as consumable supplies. It is different from loss leader marketing and free sample marketing, which do not depend on complementary products or services. Common examples of the razor and blades model include inkjet printers whose ink cartridges are significantly marked up in price, coffee machines that use single-use coffee pods, electric toothbrushes, and video game consoles which require additional purchases to obtain accessories and software not included in the original package.[1]
Personally, I don’t really want to play games on my television.
But I’m probably not really representative.
I think that the bigger issue is that a console has to be absolutely idiot-proof. You can’t have troubleshooting or tweaking or anything. Put game in, it works, fully and completely. You can’t go screw up the system by misconfiguring it.
Windows PCs aren’t really there – if they were, people would use Windows PCs, not consoles. Adding Proton to the mix – since a lot of Steam games are Windows binaries – adds another layer of complexity to that.
If you go to ProtonDB and every single game had a Platinum rating, which they do not, that’s still not enough. That means that you have something on the level of Windows, which still doesn’t meet the bar for a lot of people who use consoles.
EDIT: Well, okay, to be fair, Steam does provide a certain limited amount of best-effort isolation between games when using Proton by having a different WINE prefix for each installed game, so that’s arguably one way in which Steam+Proton is closer to the “appliance” model than a simple Windows PC.
I don’t mean to say that this is for everyone. But they sold a couple of million Steam Decks and I’d bet there’s a market for a couple of tens of millions of these boxes. And I’m not talking Windows here but Steam OS (or some derivative). That’s based on Linux but you’ll never notice unless you want to. For most people it’s just a store and a launcher. While maybe not quite as easy to use as a console, it’s certainly doable for the average gamer.
I’m a millennial and the last consoles I’ve owned were the PS3 and Wii.
I’m a millennial, and the last pc I owned was around the left 4 dead 2 era. Consoles are doing ridiculously well right now, as is pc, everything is flourishing. anecdotal remarks don’t mean much.
Are they? The Switch is, but the Xbox is doing okay, and the PS5 quite well, nothing that great though.
Yes, yes, they are. The Xbox should be in the absolute gutter with microsofts decisions over the past decade. The fact that it exists at all is a testament to how strong consoles are these days.
The switch is doing great. The ps5 is doing great. The Xbox still exists even though the Xbox One happened, and this is all in the face of the pc platform doing great.
Do you own a PC?
Do you think you’re a gamer?
If the answer is No, and Yes. Then that’s interesting otherwise, it’s nothing new.
I had a Ps4, and A Xbox One. Now I game on PC. Honestly I’m sick of modern games so I mostly retro game, but a PC is a gaming “console” in that respect.
Can’t afford a house, but a gaming PC is only $800-2000. 🤷🏻♂️
You can build your own house in Minecraft! Or own your own home in the Sims!
Hey that’s not a bad idea actually… I could live in a hole in the ground IRL, just like my first night in Minecraft!
There’s always living with your parents and saving up money if you can
If you don’t have that option avalible but have a way of getting money then you could look into bicycle campers or vanlife
But honestly fuck the exploitative capitalist system that causes homelessness in the first place