Monday, March 10, 2014

Updates On Handheld Gaming

So earlier in the lifetime of this blog I wrote a post about handheld gaming and how I believed that the mobile platform would not be taking over things.

You can find it here.

I am glad to see that some gaming website are starting to agree with me as time has gone on.

The mobile phone platform for gaming is a model that wouldn't work for serious games.  Companies have tried, and will keep trying.  However the phone seems to be a place for the Candy Crush and Angry Bird games still.  Games that you can just do repetition over and over again (there is some strategy involved but there is nothing extremely story driven) to pass the time seem to do best on mobile phones.

Its a world of micro-transactions and linking up with your social network so you can get more lives or get through levels quicker.

I admit there are RPG games, action games, platformers and the like no the app stores.  Heck SE has remade many Final Fantasy games for the mobile platform.  Yet selling games for $15 can be a deterrent.  I don't want to spend that on something that I confines me only to a small screen that will smudge up constantly and get interrupted because of phone calls or texts coming on the screen (I have it set like that because I use my phone a lot for work).  When most other mobile games are 5.99 at the most, something in the $15 range is crazy.

Yet we were predicting almost 2 years ago that handhelds would be swept away by mobile phones and their game playing capability.  Watching the ads and all the reviews it seems smartphones are more concerned about their display and the pictures they take then gaming.  Yes, they sometimes show in their ads gaming, but that isn't pushed very hard.  It is still mostly cameras and speed.

With the 3DS the most popular handheld right now, and selling like hotcakes, I believe that handheld gaming is here to stay.  What Sony is doing with the Playstation Vita and the Playstation 4 in terms of remote play of any PS4 game on the Vita virtually anywhere is the future.  If the internet infrastructure of America upholds (not too hampered by crazy corporate America, but you never know), and is improved on I see this becoming the new type of handheld gaming.  The ability to start a game anywhere and play it anywhere almost seamlessly.

I think I will check back in on this in about 6 months and see how we are doing.

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