Shortsighted again. With younger generations growing up gaming on phones mobile is the biggest threat to dedicated gaming devices altogether. In a world that makes consumption of entertainment ever more mobile strictly stationary home consoles are a dead end, no longer a viable choice to many.
But they aren't the biggest competitor to handheld gaming?! That's the claim you are objecting to.
And yes, mobile
is more of a direct competitor to handheld gaming. They have a much bigger overlap in use case.
What is short-sighted about the claim that "mobile is Nintendo's biggest competitor?"
Backward again. Arcade, early home console and handheld games defined a lot of the tool set that is now used in mobile games.
I didn't say that wasn't the case; that classic gaming doesn't inform mobile gaming, but mobile gaming does spin genres in its own way towards its own monetization scheme and with its own limitations.
You don't think that mobile spins on puzzle, strategy games and what not are designed to the peculiarities of those systems?
Also there is a place for selling "premium" re-releases of old games on mobile and a place for "mobile" games on consoles, but those are hardly the driving forces of those two markets.
The black and white split between mobile and dedicated gaming devices only happened when the whole industry massively dropped the ball during the heights of DS and Wii.
Nope. Mobile was always going to be a new platform, with new realities. It was also always going to out-DS DS.
Moreover, Japan in particular
did support the DS well, both with light proto-mobile software and PS2 successor software.
Never claimed any of that.
You didn't? I'll just quote you yourself back:
The reduced importance of home consoles, the rise of portable gaming as well as mobile phone gaming all have been coming for a very long time now.
...
With everybody having dropped the ball we today have two distinct markets today: the home console market that is dominant in the West and stagnating at best aside of expansion into new regions, and the mobile game market that's vastly dominating in Japan and China while still in expansion phase everywhere else. The PC game market is essentially feeding off the home console market, while the handheld market (pre-Switch) was mainly seen as dedicated gaming extension to the mobile game market.
What else is this all supposed to mean?! You lump the two together and claim that dedicated portables are a growing sector, when that makes absolutely no sense in any world where you are not lumping them in together.
Again, 230 million to 75 million. In what world is that growth or even status quo? It only makes sense if you roll the two in together, which you seem to want to do.
With "core" gamers getting older and younger gamers used to playing primarily on mobile "corebox" will increasingly be starved for an audience, not only in Japan (already) but increasingly also on a global scale. Already now it's mostly only sustainable on blockbuster game titles being successful, a part of which is moving to heavily DLC based monetization schemes also seen on mobile (mostly sports games and Microsoft published games).
Where is this cratering corebox market?! PS4 is probably going to hit 80-100 million. Xbox One, say, 50-60 million. PS3/360 sold what 160 million? So you're looking at maybe 130 to 160 million. The model is continuing just fine, atm.
And that's just it. You seem to be on about how this is all going to fall apart in the future because of mobile and because of how much triple A sucks, which, well, could happen. But it isn't happening atm and you don't know what companies invested in this sort of console are going to do in the future.
Nintendo needed a new way forward after GCN. As much as Iwata wanted to expand gaming, as much as "lateral thinking with withered technology" was an idea at Nintendo for a long time and always a tenet of their portable line, GCN was also proof that Nintendo could not simply offer a "better" PlayStation and win back the (Japanese) support it had lost to the original PlayStation. It wasn't Nintendo, in the position Sony and MS are in now seeing the writing on the wall and trying to change things up. It was Nintendo failing to be where Sony and MS are now trying to find a new way forward.
The point of foresight is not to change things before they need to be changed, it is to change things
as they need to be changed. Calling out Sony/MS for not seeing things as Nintendo sees them is silly.
I do think PS3 blew up in Sony's and Japanese third parties' faces, and some of those parties have found a new way forward while others are struggling still to do so.
Notably though, Sony pivoted west and co-opted the software streams that pushed early 360 to success in America and UK while also finding their footing with their first party efforts. PS4 success is the reward of positive efforts on their part to adopt to the mess they found themselves in with the PS3.
Western AAA looks like it is bound to implode someday, much like, say, Hollywood became way too big for its britches, but it hasn't yet. Moreover, with things like indie games becoming viable on these platforms and new monetizations (yes, inspired by mobile and browser monetizations), who is to say that there won't be a way forward for software on these things?
Further still, even Japanese games, which struggled so much with PS3, are starting to find a way forward on consoles as sub-AAA games of varying sizes relying on a mix of eastern/western sales and a proliferation of common tools and development outsourcing.
Basically, why assume that they won't keep changing with the times?!
And TBC, you're talking to someone who regularly rags on how bad an experience he had with PS3 and how much he thinks it was bad for the Japanese industry, and to whom the corebox and AAA doesn't speak anymore.
They are still viable in the current market and there is no reason people in that market cannot continue to adapt if/when they become less viable.
...
Also, still wondering how ANY of this discussion goes back to discrediting the very simple observations that:
a) Nintendo has more at stake in Japan than Sony or MS.
b) Portables are a disproportionately Japanese market.
c) Nintendo relies disproportionately on Japanese consumers and developers.
d) Switch's design, understandably, speaks to Japanese market realities in particular, reflecting these facts.
These are the things that you found shortsighted, backwards observations in my first post. You responded to nothing in the content of my reply to that criticism.
