Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft to Introduce GBA-competitor?
An anonymous reader writes "It seems that Nintendo will have a competition in the handheld market soon. ZDnet has an article that says Microsoft's plan to introduce a 'Media Pad' which includes among other things 'serve as a portable game player in conjunction with Microsoft's Xbox video game console.' So I guess the news I heard regarding their interest in the portable industry will soon come true, the question is, can they take the crown from Nintendo?"
While Nintendo currently have the hand-held crown it stopped accepting developers for the GBA a long time ago claiming that 400 was enough. From the handful of decent titles I'd guess it isn't.
Microsoft will at least get those developers wanting to do handheld games but blocked-out by Nintendo.
Like the GBA it would almost certainly use an ARM chip as that's the only supported processor for Windows 'CE' 2002.
[)amien
the question is can they take the crown from Nintendo
I seriously doubt it. Nintendo is particularly GOOD at what they do, especially when it comes to handhelds. Just look at the staying power of the original gameboy. Even to this day, they're still selling, pretty much the original gameboy (with much improved battery life, size, screen, etc)..
Competition is always good, but MS' product will need to completely blow away the GBA (and then some) to compete -- let's not forget that the original 4 colour gameboy sompletely outsold Sega's technologically superior (at the time)Gamegear.
Three Game Cubes for the kids with quick eyes,
Seven PlayStation 2s for the teens who are stoned.
Nine XBoxes for mortal men, doomed to play Project Gotham Racing until 4:00 AM,
One gamepad for the pocket and home.
One gamepad to play them all,
One gamepad to find them,
One gamepad to play Tony Hawk
And in the darkness grind 'em.
In the land of Microsoft
Where the shadows lie.
John
"After seeing their latest offerings (the N64 and Gamecube) lose money hand over fist,"
N64, perhaps (but keep in mind even then they were able to hold their own even with no real third-party developers). But GameCube?
"Nintendo finally learned that their core competency was in creating mediocre handheld gaming systems,"
"Finally?" Nintendo has known since at least the early N64 era that Game Boy is its bread and butter and has gone after intrusions into the market with a vengeance. Towards the end of the N64's life-cycle in Japan, we saw all sorts of accessories to connect the Game Boy Color to the N64, from the Transfer Pak that came out with Pokemon Stadium in the US to the cable that connects the game link port on the GBC to a controller port on the N64 (attatching the GBA to the GameCube isn't a new idea).
And also note that the GBA is their first backwards-compatible anything. Again, trying to tap into their bread-and-butter.
"and blaming a dearth of features on the "compromises" they needed to make in order to accomodate the handheld form factor."
It's not just the form factor they were trying to fit into, but the price factor as well. iPaqs are real nice and have all sorts of bells and whistles, but they also cost over five times as much. It's enough to make you want to play it but not so much you're afraid of breaking it.
And these "compromises" has given us a 32-bit system that does 2-D graphics better even than a Sega Saturn (let alone a PSX). It fits in the palm of my hand and it costs less than a PS One. Not too shabby in my book.
"Unfortunately, Nintendo's poor business sense and lack of R&D has finally caught up to them. They are fighting an 800-lb gorilla that has billion$ of dollars to spend on dominating every area of the market that it enters. And it looks like Microsoft is about to release a very versatile, multipurpose handheld device that will blow all of Nintendo's offerings right out of the water."
If Microsoft is an 800# gorilla, then when it comes to handhelds Nintendo must me a man with a machine gun. This isn't the console market, where the dominant player rotates every generation. We're talking about Game Boy, the Ali of the gaming world. I can think of no less than seven handheld systems offered by six different companies with all sorts of advantages (both real an imagined) that got smacked down by Game Boy and smacked down HARD! The closest thing to a second place I've seen in the field is Sega's Game Gear, and half the people that have posted here don't even remember its name.
And even before anybody thought of a hand-held video game system (where "anybody" means Gumpei Yokoi), guess who dominated the hand-held electronic games market? That's right, still Nintendo and their Game & Watch line. They've been around so long that the associated patent on a plus-shaped directional pad terminated only shortly before Sega made their Dreacast controller.
In today's world, when was the last time you saw a dominant anything that's been on the throne for over a decade? If you ask me, Microsoft would have a better chance of breaking into the CPU business. At least we've seen that there's room for competition there.