Why didn’t smartphones kill handhelds
Unless you’ve been living under a rock lately, you might have noticed that handheld gaming has become extremely popular. The Switch is now the third best selling video game system of all time. The Steam Deck meanwhile has garnered a loyal cult fanbase, with numerous clones popping up seemingly every other week. Yet if you listened to the zeitgeist ten years ago, you’d think these devices would all be dead and buried by now. That the only way we’d be playing on-the-go was via our smartphones. So what happened? I think it really boils down to mobile games over-promising and under-delivering.
Now make no mistake, mobile is the single biggest sector of the games industry. I’m not trying to claim it’s a failure. At least not in the financial sense. It’s just that a lot of unrealistic expectations were set regarding the capabilities of the platform.
There was incredible fervour surrounding mobile games in the early 2010s. A lot of indie studios sprang up overnight to capitalise on this new craze. Pundits, gamers, and developers were bullish about what kind of future it could offer for portable gaming. The iPhone had after all replaced most other single purpose electronic devices. So why couldn’t it do the same for handheld gaming systems? At least that’s what Apple thought. Particularly with the release of the iPhone 4 and its visual spectacle killer app Infinity Blade. The power was clearly there, and these devices were getting more capable with every passing year. However, the platform had two key limitations, that even to this day have never been resolved.
The first and biggest one is how the mobile economy works. The expectation was set early on that mobile games should be cheap. Consumers felt they should be the same price as a song or app off iTunes, which usually ranged from one to five bucks. Of course game development isn’t cheap. For very simple titles, under a fiver was doable. Especially with ad banners. However attempts at higher quality games, which were more expensive to purchase, were met with backlash from consumers.
By the time the honeymoon phase wore off, those indie studios suddenly realised they needed to start turning profits. Yet selling games for a song wasn’t going to cut it. So instead they’d need to devise a new, cheekier way to monetize them.
The model that ultimately won out was giving away the games for free, then recouping the costs through many small $1-5 payments for in-game currency and items. It worked because that was a tolerable level consumers were willing to pay at once, yet obfuscated just how much they were actually spending. As studios became more reliant on these “microtransactions”, they started to use in-game algorithms to artificially boost frustration for players in order to get them paying.
This model tends to benefit certain types of games in particular. Ones with simple yet addictive gameplay loops. Think your Candy Crush, Raid: Shadow Legends, and whatnot. I’ve talked about it before, but in a nutshell, it kind of painted them into a corner in terms of what they could do. Of course, there have been successful attempts at longer format games using this model. Genshin Impact probably being the most notable of these. Though these successes are pretty rare. The business model just fits better with smaller, simpler titles.
For those looking for something meatier, the gacha mechanics and constant begging for more money turned a lot of them off. A lot of hardcore gamers began to see them as predatory and trashy. While these games were a big hit with your mom, clearly they weren’t scratching the itch for an audience with more discriminating tastes.
The second issue is control. Phones really only have two input methods: the touch screen and accelerometers. Now it is possible to use a virtual controller, but these have always been unwieldy. Mainly due to the lack of haptic feedback. So much like the microtransaction business model, phone games tend to be limited to simpler gameplay loops that don’t require complex inputs. Again limiting the options for those who wanted a more console-like experience in a portable form factor.
Of course mobile did kill the handheld market, for a while. The 3DS had an agonisingly slow start, and ultimately sold less than half as many units as its predecessor. The PlayStation Vita meanwhile was a commercial failure by most metrics, with Sony dropping out of the handheld race entirely. Yet in 2017, Nintendo brought portables back with a huge bang.
One of the biggest changes was dropping the idea that handhelds had to fit in a pocket. Larger sizes meant you could pack beefier internals, higher resolution displays, full sized controllers, and better ergonomics. Yet it could still be small enough to conveniently fit into a bag or backpack. Making it ideal for commuters and travellers.
The Switch is a really ingenious bit of hardware. Nintendo coined it a “hybrid” system, due to its ability to be used as a handheld, but also dock to a TV and work like a traditional console. They weren’t the first to do this. The PSP Go even had a dock with video output. Yet they were the first to do it in an elegant way. When you slid it into the dock, it entered a high performance mode with advanced graphics and higher resolutions. Taking it out reduced GPU clock speeds, and thus performance, to maximise battery life. Yet this didn’t compromise gameplay, as Nintendo kept CPU speeds locked so as not to affect the simulation. You could really get the best of both worlds in a single device.
On top of that, Nintendo stopped distinguishing between handheld and console games. For the longest time, portable versions were always treated as a budget, second class experience. Yet now you could get the same full fat Mario or Zelda regardless of what mode you chose to play on. It was really the first handheld system that offered seamless play of AAA games. That first year alone saw a hat trick of first party titles; Breath of the Wild, Super Mario Odyssey, and Xenoblade Chronicles 2. Then it started getting so called “impossible ports”; stuff like Doom 2016 and The Witcher 3. Nintendo made it clear that if you were a hardcore gamer on-the-go, this was your best place to play. And really your only place barring expensive gaming laptops.
A string of high quality games started to lure both causal and hardcore gamers back to Nintendo. For a while, the Switch was even considered the best console companion by the PC Master Race subreddit. Simply because it did something that really no other platform offered. With mobile’s reputation for low quality, predatory games, it wasn’t hard to win customers back. Big N just had to get better content, and make sure folks knew about it.
Then in 2021, Valve unveiled the Steam Deck. It was a low end laptop packed into a handheld console shell. Again, they weren’t first to do this, but they were the first to do it well. What they did was evolve the concept Nintendo had started out with. Blur the lines between home and portable. Games you bought on Steam could be played on the Deck, or on your desktop. Thanks to cloud saves, you could fire up something on one system, then pick right back up where you left off on another.
Both systems have been phenomenal successes for their respective companies. Such so that there has been talk of Sony re-entering the handheld market next generation, with even tales of Xbox tossing their hat into the ring. People really like the flexibility both these systems offer. Smartphones meanwhile have stopped pushing the envelope of what they can do as gaming systems. Instead doubling down on the microtransaction laden gacha games they’ve become infamous for.
