Gaming On The Go, But to Where?

Recently, it was reported that in the three years since Valve’s Steam Deck was released, the Deck and its nascent competitors from Asus, MSI, and Lenovo have sold a combined six million units, of which nearly four million sales can be attributed to the Steam Deck. There are a couple of different ways of looking at this. The glass-half-full outlook is that this is a decent showing for a new and admittedly niche market. The glass-half-empty perspective is that these devices are nowhere near as popular as the gaming commentariat would have us believe. There’s truth to both sides. It can hardly be said that handheld gaming PCs are proof that the people want a new PlayStation Portable (they’ve yet to reach PS Vita levels of adoption), nor that they’re a threat to Nintendo’s dominance in the handheld market. At the same time, with how many new consumer electronics products have utterly failed in recent memory, the sales figures for handheld gaming PCs are respectable, if not impressive. Now, there are reports that Sony and Microsoft are looking to step into the ring, after some experimentation with cloud streaming handhelds earlier, and Nintendo is doubling down on their success with the Switch. What does the future hold for handheld gaming?

As is often the case, one must understand the past before they can predict the future. Handheld gaming has existed since Milton Bradley launched the Microvision in 1979. While a novel idea, it proved unsuccessful commercially, and various competitors would launch their own products that met a similar fate. There wouldn’t be a successful handheld gaming console until Nintendo launched the Game Boy in 1989, which proved to be a juggernaut they would not surpass until their DS launched 15 years later. What’s more impressive is that the Game Boy achieved this feat despite facing some real competition. The same year, Atari launched their first handheld, the Lynx, which failed to make a significant impact on the industry despite being more technologically advanced than the Game Boy. The next year, Sega would release the Game Gear, which didn’t reach the same heights as the Game Boy, but selling a total of eleven million units when no prior handheld save for the Game Boy ever reached one million is nothing to shake a stick at.

The Game Gear was quite a bit more powerful than the Game Boy, with one of its most impressive features being that it could play games from Sega’s Master System. At the time, the Master System was old news, having been succeeded by the Genesis, but it was still well ahead of any handheld at the time. The Game Boy, meanwhile, was weaker than the Nintendo Entertainment System and featured a monochrome screen. Being less powerful proved to be an advantage for the Game Boy, however. The Game Boy launched with an introductory price of only $89.99 USD, compared to $149.99 for the Game Gear. Spending more money for more power makes sense in the console space, but handhelds need to balance power with battery life. The Game Boy was powered by four AA batteries and would usually last a mighty 30 hours. The Game Gear, on the other hand, took six whole AA batteries and would last five hours at best. Later handhelds like the NEC TurboExpress and the Sega Nomad would run into similar problems: console-quality gaming in your pocket, but only for about three hours and a bevy of batteries. Nintendo stuck to their strategy of lower power, lower cost, and games made specifically for handhelds that were easy to play in small bursts rather than requiring a lot of the player’s time.

Further down the road, a few companies did try to replicate Nintendo’s strategy. 1999 saw the release of the Bandai Wonderswan and SNK’s Neo Geo Pocket Color, the latter being a successor to the very short lived Neo Geo Pocket, which was retired quickly in favour of the colour model. The Wonderswan would also see a colour version released a year later. These devices attracted some prominent developers and both managed to sell in the multiple millions, but Nintendo’s market position was so strong that they failed to make a dent and had very little relevance outside of Japan. Nintendo would remain the handheld gaming hegemon, despite ill-fated attempts like the Nokia N-Gage. Their business model of affordability and reliability, combined with their ubiquitous properties like Mario and Pokémon, was unimpeachable.

For a time, at least. Enter the PlayStation Portable. Nintendo was just dipping their toes into 3D gaming on a handheld with the DS, exemplified by launching with a remake of Super Mario 64, the game that defined their transition into the third dimension. The message seemed to be that handheld gaming was now at the level of the Nintendo 64. Sony went a step further by making a handheld with graphical capabilities approaching their PlayStation 2. Beyond the buttons and direction pad the DS had, the PSP has an analogue slider. It even had a disc drive, using Sony’s proprietary UMD format to play games and movies. Battery life was still an issue, but it was an issue for the DS as well, and now that rechargeable batteries were in vogue, it was less of a problem than ever before. The gambit worked, in a sense. The PlayStation Portable came nowhere near unseating Nintendo as the market leader, not even surpassing the sales of the Game Boy. But with 80 million units sold, it was no longer a one-man race.

One can infer a lot about the difference between the DS and the PSP by looking at their best-selling games. On the Nintendo side, you have their familiar stalwarts like Mario and Pokémon along with decidedly casual-oriented games like Brain Age, Nintendogs, and Animal Crossing. Meanwhile, on the PSP, best selling games include Grand Theft Auto, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid, and Monster Hunter. The PSP was a device meant for enthusiasts, and its success proved that handheld gaming could satisfy their needs. At the same time, it became apparent that while many PSP games seemed to be console-quality on the surface, they were never quite that sophisticated. Lots of developers tried porting their PS2 games to PSP, and these ports usually suffered from the weaker hardware, slower disk reading speeds, and inadequate control options. In the opposite direction, a number of PSP games ended up being ported to PS2. While these games may have been acclaimed on PSP, playing them on a console alongside the games designed for that hardware just made the inadequacies all the more apparent. But games designed for the handheld, played on the handheld, would still impress, so it wasn’t a big issue.

The next generation saw Nintendo and Sony go head to head once again, both continuing their prior strategies. The 3DS had hardware similar to the PSP, but with the same dual-screen gimmick and all of Nintendo’s recognizable brands. The PS Vita, on the other hand, promised even more advanced graphics and console-quality games. The result? The 3DS only sold about 50% of what the DS sold, while the PS Vita only sold about 20% of the PSP’s sales. Clearly, something was off. The underperformance of the 3DS could perhaps be attributed to the overperformance of the DS, which sold a lot to casual games who didn’t necessarily see the point of upgrading. Or maybe some people failed to understand that it was an all-new console rather than just a DS with autostereoscopic 3D. But while hardware sales were down, Nintendo’s tentpoles still sold well on the 3DS. Despite lower hardware adoption, the aforementioned Mario and Pokémon saw much smaller drops in sales. The PlayStation Vita had a lot more problems, including a hefty price and very costly memory cards. But one of the biggest problems was the games. More than ever before, handheld games were approaching the quality of new console releases. Yet there was something of an uncanny valley effect to this. A game like Uncharted: Golden Abyss was so close to being like playing an Uncharted game on PlayStation 3, but it just wasn’t quite there. At a certain point, the shortcomings become more apparent rather than less. So it seemed like Nintendo was right: handheld gamers want handheld games, rather than console games on a handheld.

But all of that fails to explain such a large shrinkage of the market. Looking beyond handheld game consoles, one begins to see the rise of mobile gaming. Suddenly, as more and more people own a smartphone, they can play games on that smartphone wherever they go. And those games were cheap. Certainly they didn’t match the best handheld games, but for the average person, they didn’t need to. It became hard to justify spending retail price for a game like Locoroco when you could buy Angry Birds or Cut the Rope for $0.99. You might balk and say Locoroco is better than those, but again, in the eyes of the casual market, was it as much as thirty times better?

Mobile gaming pushed handheld gaming to the side, and it even made its mark on console gaming. Major console releases started incorporating microtransactions to try to meet the massive revenue of some mobile games. But now, mobile games are starting to be more like console games. Something like Call of Duty Mobile is still noticeably different from what you would find on console or PC, but some major games like Genshin Impact and Fortnite are not just available on consoles and mobile, but even have crossplay between them, which is a strong indicator that the different versions are more or less the same experience.

All of this happened alongside Nintendo’s newest device, the Switch, which is a hybrid console that has sold an unbelievable number of units. Polls suggest most Switch owners use it primarily as either a console or a handheld, rather than alternating, but that just reaffirms that it works for both. Even if only half of Switch owners ever use it as a handheld, that’s still about as many people as there were 3DS owners, and regardless of that, both halves would still be playing the same games. After years of having different strategies for handhelds and consoles, Nintendo merged them into one, with great success at that. One can still perceive a divide between console-coded games like Super Mario Odyssey and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild as opposed to handheld-coded games like Super Mario Bros Wonder and The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, but when they’re on the same platform, it’s not a big deal. The Switch even attracted strong third-party support, something Nintendo has struggled to hold onto since the N64. The Switch version of a given game is almost certain to be the worst version, but for lots of people, that’s a price they’re willing to pay. Now, the handheld gaming PCs mentioned in the beginning of this article offer something to the enthusiasts who want the handheld experience without the compromises of the Switch. This is demonstrably a small audience, but it’s one that could potentially grow.

To summarize, there have been three major eras of handheld gaming. In the first, handhelds could match console performance, but at a cost that simply wasn’t worth it. In the second, handhelds were unable to match consoles, which was okay at first, but became a hindrance over time. The third era is where we are now, when handhelds reached the point of being able to play console games, and not just as a possibility, but as a necessity. Anything less than a console-quality experience would struggle to compete with mobile gaming. This means that if Sony goes ahead with a new PlayStation handheld, it will need to play PlayStation 5 games. This isn’t even just because that’s what people want. Sony can ill afford to spend precious resources supporting two platforms with two completely different lineups of games. That was part of what killed the Vita. My biggest fear is that this approach will funnel us into an all-digital future. After all, wouldn’t you rather buy a game once than twice to play it on two platforms? Unless their hypothetical next handheld is truly the PSP2 and features an UHD Blu-ray drive (not likely!), people like me with largely physical collections are going to be left in the cold. The only other approach is some sort of DRM that will match a physical copy of a game to a PlayStation Network account, but that’s the sort of thing that scares people.

I can’t tell you whether or not handheld gaming is “back” in the sense of its heyday. If we do see a resurgence, or if we’re in one right now, it’s going to be one that does not resemble the past. The gaming landscape has changed too much. The Pandora’s Box of mobile gaming cannot be closed. But with hardware manufacturing costs rising, perhaps a pivot away from continuous hardware growth and into smaller alternatives is a healthy direction.