Topic: If the NX IS a console/handheld hybrid do you think people will bother using it on their TV?

Most of my friends who play video games play exclusively on phone and console. Remember, Candy Crush and Words With Friends aren't games that only casuals play. They are games that everyone plays. I'd argue a lot of non-casuals simply don't care too much about playing high-quality "console-esque" experiences on the go.

You aren't wrong that there is definitely a market for handheld games, but that market is strictly hardcore gamers (and kids, but that's a little harder to analyze). The minority of people who are actively looking for games like Bravely Default or Fire Emblem on the go. I believe the non-casual mass market (i.e. the people who mostly buy well known big budget games like Mario, CoD, Assassin's Creed, Uncharted, and Halo) has lost most interest in handhelds though

In my opinion, Nintendo does need to keep catering to hardcore handheld gamers, but they need to design their device with the assumption that it won't pass 30-40M units lifetime. They aren't reaching Gameboy sales ever again.

I agree with khan. It is a shrinking market, not totally gone. Also, many beloved series could work on mobile with a few modifications. It is basically only twitch-based games that are better on portable consoles. And those have also worked better at home than on a train.

@Therad: "It is just idiotic elitism"

Relax, man. You just criticized me for using the word "gamer" (I never used "casual," by the way - go back and check my post. I make a point not to use that word), yet you have no problems attacking back with a phrase like "idiotic elitism"? That seems a bit ironic to me.

Anyway, I never said that smart phone/tablet games aren't popular or aren't making money. I was establishing that 3DS (or Vita, for that matter) is simply a different market segment when it comes down to it. They've been coexisting for about a decade, and the 3DS is sitll around, still doing well. The Vita may not be doing well (ha), but it IS still around, too. Their need hasn't plummeted like many have predicted.

@ iKhan
As for you, as usual, I don't really know what to say. I've had VERY different life experiences than you have, apparently lol My friends, even now that we are all quite old, do not use their smart phones or tablets to game. They use them to make phone calls and text, and maybe play something like that temple running game from time to time.

Worth pointing out that the US perspective on things is very, very different to the global perspective. In Japan where mobile gaming is even bigger than it is here in the west it's the home console market that's "dead". Over there the portable console market is as strong as it has ever been. In the US it has kinda split differently, the home console market remains strong while portable gaming loses out to mobile.

It's kinda hard to measure how big mobile is, but for perspective here's console software sales for 2014:
US: 16% portable, 84% non-portable
Japan: 69% portable, 31% non-portable

And again, I don't think it's a strange idea to want to play games on a dedicated system rather than a phone. My phone right now has no games on it. None. And I have little desire to install any games on it. Why would I bother given how much the battery gets hammered? For silly little puzzle games every now and then? Word games and so on, maybe an RPG. Sure. But it's far from even being close to a platform where I'd want to play something like Mario, Zelda, Smash Bros or Mario Kart. Unless those games were seriously watered down to the point where they wouldn't be the same games anymore.

@skywake: Yea. I have Temple Run 2 on my phone, but I couldn't tell you the last time I played it. I just don't really find myself saying, "Man, I just want to sit down and play some Temple Run for a few hours" like I would for Fire Emblem or Sticker Star or Link Between Worlds. I know some people do, but it's just not how I feel.

When I first got a smart phone a couple years ago (yea, I was a hold out lol I'm sure nobody is surprised by that), I dove right in and downloaded games like crazy. I downloaded some of the older Final Fantasy games, the Angry Birds stuff, etc. Probably deleted everything about a week later. It just wasn't for me. It was weird with no buttons, it didn't feel "real," or...I don't know how to explain it... "lasting"?? I can't think of a good word. I just knew that, for ME (everyone's mileage varies), a smart phone is nowhere near a substitute for a GameBoy/DS/Vita. The games, the general quality, the overall experience. Just isn't for me.

I think there will always be room for dedicated gaming machines, whether it is portable or home console. There will always be people looking to get more out of their hobbies and there will always need to be dedicated machines. The Popularity of Marvel films isn't stopping serious movies from coming out. eReaders might be replacing books, but there will always be people who want to read words off of a dead tree. It really depends if you are a passive or active member of the hobby. I like eReaders and digital books because I am a passive reader. I prefer 3DS over Android because I want a richer experience and more input options to better suit more variety of games. The mobile market will be better at satisfying the passive consumers while the more active ones will want different hardware to better suit their needs.

I'm still hoping for a premium experience away from the screen. Nintendo could pull a hololens and revolutionize gaming.

@DefHalan: I think for gaming it's a little bit different than a lot of the other things that have changed. With books obviously there will always be a market for actual books but the digital book is quite literally the same thing. It's even more true with dedicated devices for playing back music, sure there's still a "market" but it's hard to understand why when phones do literally as good a job. With cameras for most people a phone camera is good enough and because of that phone cameras have killed the low-end phone market entirely. Because it's literally the same thing.

For gaming it's very different. Naturally there are some games where the transition to pure touch controls is elegant. Some ideas work pretty fantastically even like Draw Something, Fruit Ninja, Angry Birds or Clash of Clans. But there are some existing styles of games which will never work as well on phones and tablets as they exist. Playing Splatoon for example sure I'm aiming with the gyro and touching on the screen where I want to leap. Easy done. But I'm also walking around, firing, diving into ink, using a sub weapon and activating my special weapon. Those controls could easily work on the 3DS.... I can't see how they'd work on a phone or tablet. There are so many games like that, most of them would struggle to be translated onto a phone without something being lost.

@skywake: I was going to type up this whole long thing but decided not to. Basically, I agree about the different technologies providing different experiences, but I think the truly passionate in any hobby care about those differences, whether it be books, music, photography, film, or games the truly passionate will chase down the best experience for them.

@DefHalan: I don't disagree, I was just making the point that for different media the level of enthusiasm required to be "not happy" with phones/tablets are different. For music you have to be a special kind of fan to not be happy, probably one that still buys vinyl. So the market is pretty small. I'm enough of a music enthusiast that I still buy CDs, pay for subscription services and obsessively catalogue and rank what I listen to. But even for me phones are good enough and I'd argue actually better at it. It's at the point now where if you walked into your average store asking for a portable music player that's not like a phone... they'd show you the iPod Shuffle....

Then a little bit further down from there there's photography. If you're not really into photography at all and just want to take photos whenever? Well your phone probably does a good enough job. For some people that's all they really see the need for. But if you want to get even remotely serious about it lenses matter and there's a limit to how good a lens on a phone can be. Because physics. So the level at which people are unhappy with their phone's camera is lower than it is for music. And so the market for dedicated cameras is a lot stronger than the market for mp3 players.

With gaming it's different. The point at which people want more than their phones or tablets can give them comes far earlier. So I think it's only fair to conclude that portable gaming won't die in the same way that portable music and even low-end digital cameras did. I don't think we'll ever get to a point where Nintendo can't release a portable system and sell millions of copies of Smash Bros, Mario Kart, Pokemon and Animal Crossing. And if that was the case I'd argue it would have happened already.

@skywake: I actually think that could happen soon. I have been expecting/fearing a video game crash (not as bad as before but still pretty bad) for years and I am constantly surprised when a new game breaks sales records. Nintendo will probably be the least effected by it as their software has serious selling potential, and Nintendo is the company I would trust the most to deliver to the most passionate of players while other companies decide it is better to put smaller products on smart phones, you see that happening already. Even Nintendo sees the mobile market as a worthwile audience but I think they see it as a portal and less as a main target.

@DefHalan: Well the video game crash in the 80s happened for two main reasons. The market had a hit saturation point and the industry tried to plough through it oblivious to the fact. Secondly the quality of software was low, part of the reason why Nintendo was able to revive the market was because they controlled what was released on their platform. What gaming market is that more true for ATM?

I'd argue that if any part of the gaming industry is due for a crash it would be mobile. Everyone is jumping on the bandwagon, the market is crowded, quality control is non-existent. I'd argue it's also fairly true on the other side of the market also. The big AAA releases, they're also in somewhat of a bubble ATM. Nintendo had their little bubble with the DS and Wii, they've survived it. It'll be interesting in the next few years to see what happens to the other players.

@skywake: I agree with that. Or maybe it's just me being hopeful....lol...so evil.

@skywake: I do think people are becoming more accepting of the Mobile Market while there seems to be a lot of talk about not trusting AAA market. Both are doing really well and only time will tell what will happen.

I don't get what people are talking about when you say that a portable would be less powerful than a Wii U.

Wii U specs: (optimistic)
3Ghz Tri-core
1Gb of RAM (that's usable)
32Gb storage
equivalent of an AMD 4800 series graphics card (quite old)

If we're looking into the future, naturally things that are expensive now will come down in price. Right now for $1,000 to $1,500 you can get a laptop that is more powerful than a PS4 and does 6-10 hours on a single charge.

Even if we're talking about small electronics, a Galaxy S5 has a
2.5 GHz QUAD-core,
32 Gb storage
2 Gb USABLE memory
and slapping a mobile graphics card in there would not be out of the question... and this is $550.

Not to mention they've opened up the possibility of selling the hardware at a loss with the 3DS in order to gain a profit on software sales.

So... even if the NX is a portable with wireless streaming to the TV, that doesn't necessarily make it less powerful than a Wii U.

@Neoproteus:
I had a technical rant written down explaining why it's more complicated than that but I don't think pointing that out will get us anywhere. Instead I'll just point out the three different paths they could go down.

1. They build a decent portable first and maybe have streaming to your TV as a feature. As a portable I'd argue that ideally they'd aim for a price point somewhere around $200-250US. Less if they can. That sort of price point should give them a spec somewhere between the Vita and 360. For a portable that's more than fine, I don't think there'd be much complaining. I think we can assume that it would sell reasonably well and also move people away from the 3DS/Vita era of portables. For a home console? You can already get the Wii U for that price now and the Wii U is a far more capable machine than that. Effectively it would replace the Wii U in the same way that the Vita replaced the PS3 (i.e. not at all).

2. They make a home console. Either ignoring the "hybrid" idea entirely or doing it in the same way the Wii U did. If they targeted a price-point of something around $350US? The PS4 spec is right at that price point a year from now. Easily. Effectively at that price people would walk into the shops and have three consoles infront of them. Nintendo's machine, Sony's and Microsoft's. Same price, same spec, different exclusives. Nintendo could go either a bit more pricey than them and beat their specs, or a tiny bit under the spec and undercut them. Either way it'd certainly be replacing the Wii U and it would be somewhere in the ballpark of the PS4 spec.

3. They try to be competitive in both spaces. It's as high spec as it can be for a portable device and maybe it gets upto around where the Wii U is. For such e device they'd have to sell it for $400-500US to make a return. As a portable that's way too expensive. As a home console that's also too expensive for the spec. Sure on paper such a device could replace the Wii U but at that price? Not only doesn't it make people think twice about the PS4 but even sitting next to the Wii U on the shelf the Wii U is a better buy.

@Neoproteus: $550 is quite expensive for a dedicated console. Most smartphones are not bought at that price, at least not upfront. It is also more than the launch price of ps3, and we all know how well that turned out.

Edit: Also, you can't look at specs in that way. For example, just because one has one more cpu-core doesn't mean it is better. It is more about how many operations the CPU can output per second. They have totally different hardware architectures and also different needs.

I find it hilarious that people got so attached to the fusion idea because of some rumor. Although the concept would be cool, it is highly improbable. As already said, there is the power and price, but there is also cannibalizing sales and forcing one market to combine with the other. I assume the handheld would be the controller, so in the case that it breaks, you are royally screwed. Not only that, but that idea is basically the Wii U all over again, and Iwata had stated that they don't build upon previous hardware and Reggie stated that they want to let game developers do stuff they couldn't do with the current console (could be referring to power, but meh). Not only that but we have the forced "new-concept" that will apparently bring new ways to play.

What is obviously more likely is a family of devices (since Iwata basically said it), the first being NX in that family. Assuming NX is a home console, they would release it, and then next in the family will probably be a handheld, where the OS and architecture are closely related to make porting games much easier. I'm sure they will throw in hybrid capabilities into the two, like the relationship between PS4 and vita, but we are not getting a all-in-one box. If you are still not believing me that they won't fuse their hardware, then here you go:
http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/ninplat...

I'll add to that some context. That particular slide came after this one:

They showed the Wii U and 3DS to represent both the "past" and "future" platforms. Why? Well because they weren't talking about the platforms. They were talking about the transition from one generation to the next. You brought a NES VC game on the Wii, you had to buy it again on the Wii U, then again on the 3DS. You added a friend to your friends list on your Wii, you had to add them again to your 3DS, again to your Wii U. There were some solutions to some of that but they were all over the place and kinda clunky.

Basically when you brought a Wii U your Wii U was disconnected from your Wii. It didn't really know what content you played previously or what your previous purchases were. Same with going from the DS to 3DS and between home console and handheld. All the way back to the NES and Gameboy. What they were saying was that with the NNID that would change. Starting with the 3DS and Wii U. Then with the next generation of devices.

I don't think that slide at all says that they're merging the two devices. All it's saying is that their new service, tied to the your NNID, will collect all of your Nintendo stuff under one single account.

I do NOT believe NX is a hybrid in that Nintendo would have just one new piece of hardware.

I'm going with what Iwata said. Nintendo does not aim to create just one game machine, and that in the future Nintendo will have consoles and portables in a variety of form factors with a common architecture regardless of the power / performance of each system. They will be like "brothers in a family of systems".

It could not have been more clear.