Can Ninty save the handheld market like it did w/ console?

As much as I love my Vita and 3ds, it's pretty clear tablets and smartphones are eating away at the handheld market. What can Nintendo do to prevent this? Or is not possible? I ask you SW cause you know eveything.

I don't think nintendo or sony can "Stop" the prevalence of phone and tablet gaming , its too big of a phenomenon now and too convenient for most people who already have a phone but don't want to pay extra money and sacrifice pocket space for a handheld video game console.. you also have to consider with the phones advancing in tech at a unbelieavable pace and the increasing ease for people to make games for phones, and also GB, GBA, NES, SNES, N64, DS , Ps1, PsP emulators that work well on high powered phones and tablets, they're starting to offer some stiff competition.

I'm still a believer in handheld video game consoles myself, can offer you a better experience than most portable phone games, Proud New 3DSXL owner, and previous owner of Game Boy Pocket, Game Boy Advanced SP, PSP, and Vita..

When Nintendo saved Console gaming in the first place ? I dont get you .

It's impossible to compete with the convenience of playing mobile games on a device you already own and carry around with you everywhere. Casual gamers who are satisfied with touch controlled mini games won't need a handheld. The truth is, the number of people who seek out deep experiences and specifically want to be able to bring those games with them from place to place but NOT play those games on big screen TVs isn't huge. This is the inevitable result of a market shrinking because most consumers found other ways to satisfy their needs.

To Nintendo's credit, they integrated a technology which could only have been done on handhelds by using autostereoscopic head tracking 3D. But that's not what's really selling 3DSs, the games are. As long as good exclusive games are released on handhelds, gamers will still buy them if just to play the games on them. There is also an audience for small children who are too young to be trusted with smartphones and other expensive electronics 24/7.

If they don't pull it off with their next handheld, then no, they can't do it period.

I guess as long as they make a profit and hit their margins then it wont matter, handheld gaming wont die as long as the company is happy with the product on all counts.

Aren't tablet sales way down across the board? Not implying mobile gaming isn't growing. Just thought I'd toss that in there.

They saved it in 1985 I believe with the release of the NES and some strict policies in place to stop over-saturation.

Tablet gaming is horrible, and I am not sure gamers will ever leave the joystick behind for a tablet. Yes they will get sales from soccer moms, etc but if you look at profits and sales figures the phone is still way behind.

https://thinkgaming.com/app-sales-data/

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_Nintendo_3DS_video_games

Posted from my iPad that has about $10 in game installs. Does not hold a candle to what I have spent on the vita. Spent more than that on Pesona 4.

I don't really see how the links you provided support such a theory. Even assuming every person payed the $40 MSRP for 3DS titles, there's 16 that sold $1 million or more. Number 50 on the mobile revenue chart is estimated at $32,000 a day. That works out to over $11 million a year. Also, while the 3DS sales are worldwide, the mobile only counts the US and only iPhone, not the larger Android install base.

@asylumni: I think those are sales to date, and not sales per day, but could be wrong.

Apple makes on average 10 cents per app.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/tristanlouis/2013/08/10/how-much-do-average-apps-make/

Nope, it shows on the upper right, the period of a day and if you click on a title, it clarifies it as daily revenue.

So if Nintendo make 500 million (a figure I will use) from their handheld in a year or lifetime whatever, they should give that up just because mobile phones made more? I can just imagine these console companies saying "you know what guys, our 500 million profit is nothing compared to what Apple made last year, lets close up shop".

I'm addressing the topic here, as long as a company is in the green and they and their stock holders are happy it will not die.

I said nothing even remotely close to that. I think Nintendo will continue on as long as they can make money over-all (leaving room for short term losses in a sector if need be). In other words, I don't see Nintendo going away for the foreseeable future.

I was just responding to a claim that phone revenue is nowhere near that of handhelds and the links provided that I don't believe support that claim.

Yeah I edited my post to have it address the overall thread topic. Yes handheld sales can't match the figures of mobile, it's an unfair comparison, people buy phones to be phones though, gaming on it is an added benefit, I don't know anyone that would go out and buy an iPhone or Android or any other cell phone just to play games, games as its main function.

@asylumni: thanks. My iPad wasn't allowing me to select that option, but your direct link worked great. But not sure if you saw the other link on how much Apple makes per app. So much lower than Nintendo or others, but with such a huge hardware base it can really add up.

Also you can't assume that a game will keep it selling trend the entire year.

Will see what happen with the next Nintendo handheld, if it sells less than 3DS then yea....Im in the minority though, I don't game on phone/tablet...& it sucks that gaming seems to be going that way. :P

I don't know why we haven't seen a Nintendo phone yet. I would buy one immediately. Think if you had your 3ds, but could also call/text. It would be so perfect. I don't bring my 3ds anywhere because I'm just so paranoid about having so many devices on me. But if my phone and gaming device were the same, that would be awesome.

lol next gen? please, this was their gen to do it, with the way phones are going it's already a done deal. They'll be walking into a much smaller market unless Nintendo suddenly creates the greatest phone that just happens to work like a traditional handheld in terms of gaming.

I don't think the hand held market is in trouble. Yes the vita and psp didn't do that well, and the only other serious competitors are Nintendo. But I'd wager that with the upcoming release of windows 10, you can expect the mobile market to take huge leaps into console capable graphics at affordable prices inside tablet devices instead of custom built things like the 3ds. Mobile tech is about to overtake console capability, and in 5 years time that ability will be affordable to everyone who can afford a console or laptop, and it will include the whole of the pc games market to play from. If that doesn't get people excited for mobile gaming then I don't know what the **** else will.

Now I see you added it. Actually, that article breaks down what the developers make per year. But I think that's a useless statistic. Sure, there's a ton of useless apps that make no money, but breaking it down that way really obscures the actual money made by the developers. It takes the total revenue and divides it evenly among 800,000 Android apps and 1.25 million iOS apps. 3DS has what, near 1000 games? Developers made $900 million from android and $5 billion from iOS, both per year. How much did developers for the 3DS make? We're talking at least 235,000 developers on the mobile front. That's more than 200 times as many developers as 3DS has games. Of course there's going to be a lot more trash and a lot more failures. That doesn't mean there aren't also a lot of developers that do make quite a bit of money.

The entire industry crashed in 1983 with Atari. Nintendo resuscitated it 3 years later with the launch of the NES.

You got it now? :)

I think a bigger priority for Nintendo should be trying to save console gaming in Japan... Console gaming is almost dead in Japan, almost as bad as the state of console gaming in North America during 1983-1984.

I think the fusion plan with cross platform and corss buy... if it happens will be the biggest thing for handhelds. They need to add phone functionality for it in Japan though. If they do, then they will own it.

Smartphones and tablets will need to either have buttons or get non-laggy bluetooth down for handhelds to become obsolete.

@topgunmv: All ready a problem that has been dealt with, by more then one company actually. It's surprising people on this site don't even know about half this shit.

That was a US crisis ... not a worldwide one. US is not the world you know. So NES saved console gaming ? Naaah ...

You should read carefully what really happened and in which part of the world. NES would have been a success imho , crisis or not. Saved ? Who ? Japanese market ? European ? No ... US one ... US is not the world. So to say generally they saved console gaming because of a specific crisis on a specific region ... Nope , that wont do. NES was a solid console with solid games and it would have been a success , crisis or not , US or EU or Japan. Period

The 3DS seems to be catching up with the GBA. The DS may never happen again, but all that TEH IOS AND TEH ANDROID WILL KILL TEH HANDHELD RIP KIDTENDO scenario seems far fetched.

i am going to be very interested to see what nintendo do with their next handheld. a proper gaming phone? a range of different devices ranging from gaming phones to gaming tablets that run on the one platform? just business as usual or something completely mad?

i dont think it will be right to break the market down as the handheld market and the mobile market as is done in SW. i think it would be better for them to ask "how can we make mobile gaming better?". really they should be the same thing.

if nintendo can make their next device the best device to play mobile games on (note: not necessarily the most powerful) while also filling most of the needs of people in terms of smartphone functionality they could win space in more peoples pockets. for people who prefer to do their gaming, even their handheld gaming, at home a tablet version of their handheld may be more suitable.

its going to be a very interesting space to watch in the next few years.

Make shit loads of first party titles that can only be played on their own devices and make nothing for anyone else. Pretty much what Nintendo do now.

People don't know because it's still laggy as shit.

Prevent mobile growth (2 in 1s, tablets, ph/ablets, smartphones, etc.)? They can't prevent that on their own.

Nintendo could probably keep the 3DS marketshare (similar sales for the next gen 3DS). They just need to continue making their games and securing no less 3rd party activity than what the 3DS already have.

If I wanted N to be more ambitious then maybe make the next gen 3DS quite powerful and with "L3/R3" thus becoming the first handheld multi-platform device (not feauture castrated versions of CoD, FIFA, NFL, WWE and more titles in generally medium settings but maybe rendering to at least 800x480 or 800x480 per eye [nothing lower] and framerate no worse than the console versions).

Europe was ZX Spectrum and C64 land. Japan was Pachinko and arcades. The NES unified the mass adoption of one home console across multiple regions.

So it saved the console market in the US. Made Japanese people finally adopt home gaming and started the ball rolling with the same mass appealing machine in Europe. Worldwide adoption of the same device allowed the industry we now have.

dedicated mobile gaming has never been a "market" since it always been Nintendo and no one else. lol

Uh, no.

I grew up during that time and I recall precisely how things went down, dude.

Atari not only started a gaming revolution, but they brought on the entire computer revolution as well. Most of the first home computers we owned were Atari 400 and 800's, followed later by Commodore who was trying to get into a home computer market that Atari was then creating.

When the company started crashing in 1983, everything they created, influenced or had any kind of hand in elsewhere, went down with them. Arcades, Video Games, Home Computers, all of it. It just died seemingly overnight. And for three years everything tied to Tech was simply flat-lined.

You can call it a "US only thing", but the fact is, Nintendo was one of the companies affected by the gaming crash of 1983. Three of their coin op games, Donkey Kong (1981), Donkey Kong Jr (1982) and Super Mario Bros (1985) no longer had a viable Arcade industry to thrive in. Which was one of the factors that drove Nintendo to reinvent the home console market. And so, in 1986, we got the NES. And guess what three games were featured on their first console?

Anyway, the machine was a success, Nintendo re-lit the torch Atari couldn't sustain and carried on where Atari left off. And like Atari, Nintendo influenced others to become part of the industry and help drive it. First with Sega, then later with Turbograffix, Panasonic, Phillips, Sony and eventually Microsoft. Nintendo just didn't fumble it all away with bad business decisions like Atari (actually, Time Warner) did.

But all of it leads back to Atari. And to Nintendo, who resurrected what Atari left behind in it's wake.

I was there. I saw it with my own eyes. I lived it with my own years. That's what happened. Peroid.

P-E-R-I-O-D.

Again , is US !! You talking about a single market !! If Nintendo saved video gaming in US it doesnt mean Japan , Europe or other big regions where in the same position because ATARI was in deep shit ! So talking in general , that Nintendo saved the world ... Wont do it for me. Period !

And let me guess , you are a fellow american .... I mean ..come on!

EDIT : Read carefully this sentence

"" The crash almost destroyed the then-fledgling industry and led to the bankruptcy of several companies producing home computers and video game consolesin the region, including the fastest-growing U.S. company in history at that point, Atari ""

Several ( means not all ) , in the region ( US ) , US company ( US ) , Atari ( US ) ...

Do you get it now or not ?

NES era.

Another US guy ?

Nintendo can't do anything to prevent this. The market is different today. When the DS came out, smartphones weren't big yet. If you wanted to game on the go, a dedicated handheld was the best pick. These days, people have more options. As a result, 3DS isn't selling as well as its predecessor. It has still managed to sell over 40 million units in the age of multifunctional smart devices, which is respectable.

I think the best way Nintendo can coexist in the marketplace is to expand on what its handheld can do in conjunction with the home console. Iwata has already spoken about the next console and handheld having a common development platform for easy porting. Nintendo's greatest strength is its IPs, and if it can get them to both platforms faster, it'll be a huge benefit for them. I would go so far as to say that a common platform isn't just a good idea, but a necessity given Iwata's comments about the next handheld incorporating Wii U's architecture, which is widely unpopular among 3rd parties.

Seems like a no brainer IMO sell games on phones and tablets problem solved.

The thing about the console is that there isn't much of a technology to replace it. With handhelds, the most popular devices in the world encroach upon what it does. I don't think it's a matter of "saving" the handheld any more than cable can 'save' TV from the internet. All handhelds can really hope to do is co-exist.

As long as Nintendo makes a profit off there handhelds they will continue to make them. The 3DS might be lagging behind the DS but it's still made Nintendo a ton of money and will continue to do so. The day it stops selling is the day they probably start developing for Mobile.

Nintendo cannot stop the tide of mobile gaming. The user base is too big. Also tablets and phones are pretty powerful now with tablets already surpassing handhelds including the Vita. I mean hell I have a Nexus 7 ($199) which is over 2 years old now and it can play games as powerful or more than the Vita. The Nvidia Shield Tablet or Nexus 9 are way more powerful than any handheld and they can stream to your TV in the living room. People use these for everyday life not just gaming so it's just more convenient.

This is all wrong, I'll start by asking where did you find anything about the computer industry crashing? The Computer industry was booming after the console crash and the games on computers before and after were 5 steps ahead.

Nintendo didn't save the console market (people were still buying games and consoles) they re-valued the console "industry" (developers and retailers weren't losing money on games) which was low at the time. Well not alone, but mostly them.

Exactly!

I pretty much said all of that already. You're just leaving out the parts that happened afterwards:

"Nintendo re-lit the torch Atari couldn't sustain and carried on where Atari left off. And like Atari, Nintendo influenced others to become part of the industry and help drive it. First with Sega, then later with Turbograffix, Panasonic, Phillips, Sony and eventually Microsoft. Nintendo just didn't fumble it all away with bad business decisions like Atari (actually, Time Warner) did".

And don't forget, Nintendo (a long with Sega) expanded the industry by introducing their machines to new territories that didn't have any before (thus, the market grew). Meanwhile, Atari relocated to Europe after the crash (to France I think...?). I know this because all of my neighbors were former Atari employees. Most were laid off, but the ones who remained had to relocate with the company overseas. It was a pretty shitty time.

Booming?

Who was booming in Home Computers in 1982-83? IBM and Apple both existed, but neither had anything as popular as an Atari or a Commodore at that time. Hewlett Packard had just started forming in 1983 and visited my high school to recruit students as engineers, but had no product yet.

The only companies I recall having anything for the home consumer was Atari (The 400 and the 800), Commodore (The Commodore 64 and 128, then the Amiga a few years later) and Coleco (The Adam). The Atari 400 and 800's were both wildly popular to start because they were the first machines introduced. Commodore came later with the C64 followed by the Coleco Adam (which released the same year the crash happened). When Atari stopped making products, everyone began slowly gravitating to Commodore. And that went on until 1986 when the NES hit store shelves. And we all forgot about our Commodore machines overnight.

Actually, Nintendo did in Japan. The Famicom/NES was responsible for establishing console gaming as a mainstream industry in Japan, which was previously dominated by arcades and home computers. In other words, the Famicom/NES had a big impact on both Japan as well as North America. But in Europe, yeah, it was the Sega Master System that established console gaming as a mainstream industry here. Same goes for South America, which was a Sega market for a long time.

I wont deny that NES was a big success that established in some extend console gaming as mainstream ..But that doesnt translate to saving.

Thats what im trying to say ... Saved console gaming in US not in other parts in the world , including Japan. I dont disagree with you.

In Japan's case, I wouldn't exactly call it "saving", since Japan didn't have much of a console industry to begin with, but there's no denying that it was Nintendo that established console gaming there, with the Color TV Game and especially the Famicom/NES. In that sense, Nintendo also deserves credit for establishing console gaming in Japan.

But when it comes to Europe, I agree with you. Nintendo had very little impact in this region, compared to the big impact that Sega had here.

Im not taking away any credit :) , all im saying is ... you cant blantly say NES saved console gaming in general .. I cant agree with that sentence , i just cant. :)

I agree with everything you saying though