Saturday, March 16, 2013

Why Smartphones Won't Kill Game Consoles

If you follow gaming news, that's the primary headline to carry away. "Angry Birds is pretty much on the same level with Farcry 3 in terms of quality, development costs, and everything. It won't be long before phones eat 100% of game consoles' market share." Ok, so I'm just beating up a straw man there, but you get my point. Apparently the readily available supply of games and newer business models will eventually kill Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony. I have my doubts for a couple of reasons. Behold!

A Bigger Screen One of my friends came over with her kid one day. He brought his 3DS and Ocarina of Time 3D. I've heard worse reasons to turn on Ocarina of Time 64. I just wanted to show him what the game originally looked like, but one of his comments surprised me, "I think your version of Ocarina of Time is better. It's bigger."

Obviously, Ocarina of TIme 3D has substantially better graphics than Ocarina of Time 64. However, he -- a kid who grew up during the smartphone age -- preferred the console version to the handheld version (which is, in my opinion, quite comparable to a smartphone game. Probably better since it's Zelda.). As long as smartphones aim to be small portable devices, they'll never be able to duplicate the same kind of experience that a game console can.

A Dedicated Device Phones are limited by the fact that they are phones. I find playing most console games via phone hard to imagine. The adequate control schemes just aren't there. There are a good many people that prefer console games to computer games for this same reason, and the PC is far more well disposed to give you a good experience than some phone.

Smartphones will destroy game consoles? BS.

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