it blows my mind that the portable camera, video and music player markets have all been affected by mobile phones and now tablets, and people are still in denial and think portable videogames are immune to that.
Well, the mass-media position that people are arguing against every time here is "the iPhone proves all portables are dead 4evahs LAWLZ!!!!" It's an argument from ignorance that runs down a list of false equivalencies, time-locked assumptions, and bad models to feed a pre-determined narrative. It's the written equivalent of the wonky PS3 chart: people outside the industry giving away
I mean: absolutely phones and tablets are competing with dedicated portable game systems. They have an obvious value as a substitutionary good: for many uses, an iPhone can already substitute completely for a DS or PSP in someone's daily activity. Both Nintendo and Sony are going to, on balance, lose access to a great deal of potential sales that have been diverted to these platforms. (Nintendo has probably lost their ultra-casual market forever to phones, which is why 3DS is so much more core-oriented.) Both have already significantly changed their strategies in obvious ways as a result on 3DS and PSV.
But what these articles ignore is that these platforms
also compete with console games (and console and portable games compete with each other, and they all compete with PC games, etc.) Some of the ways smartphones impinge on the gaming industry are equally threatening to the home market --
especially their pricing model. Meanwhile, while consoles are still selling well in the US, TV devices are increasingly irrelevant in the overall market while portable devices are increasingly central -- which raises the question of how a company like Sony or Microsoft is planning on bridging the gap from their soon-to-be-legacy console business to the mobile future if dedicated gaming portables aren't that bridge.
All of
this stuff is actually potentially interesting to talk about in a way that the dumbness in the Forbes article really isn't.
People keep throwing this around yet they have several DS games including Liberty City Stories, Ghost Trick
hantom Detective, and Ace Attorney and plenty of "core" games like Infinity Blade, etc.
The bevy of console and handheld ports on iOS are viable only because they're second/third/fourth releases of titles that have already recouped. They're the equivalent of VC titles selling for $8 that originally retailed for $80 -- that content isn't viable at that price point, in that kind of marketplace, without a first release at a more normal price.
Infinity Blade, on the other hand, is a perfect example of what a "AAA" mobile game looks like, both visually and content-wise, and that $7 price point is a lot more conducive to what GAF posters might think of as "real games" than $0.99 is. But we haven't yet really seen other skilled developers and publishers make a serious play at this niche besides Epic.
