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DS, PSP Could Claim Supremacy in Console Wars
njkid1 passed us another link to a GameDaily article, this one quoting analysts at DFC Intelligence as seeing a sort of usurpation of the console space by portable games. With the DS consistently outselling almost every other system on the market since last year, it's possible that the DS may become the best-selling system 'of all time'. Moreover, portable consoles may actually grow to have a larger market share than their more expensive, high-def cousins. "This comes from DFC's latest report on the portable gaming market, which the firm predicts will exceed $10 billion in worldwide revenue this year, led by the DS. DFC said that the PSP will 'establish a solid position in the marketplace' but that much of the Sony portable's fate will depend on how much effort Sony Computer Entertainment decides to put into promoting the platform over the next few years."
You're right, it is skewing. On the other hand, while the PSP has only managed to capture ~21M in sales (versus the ~40M of the DS), either one has managed to sell more than the Wii, PS3, or XBox 360 combined (so far).
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I've been saying this for quite some time now. Out of this generation, the DS will likely be the console winner. I'm not just talking about raw sales, the GBA outsold the PS2 by a lot, but it was still thought of as being a very very different kind of machine. No, what I mean by "winner" is "winner" in the truist sense of the word: competing head to head with the 360, PS3 and Wii, as a console, not just as a handheld console.
Firstly, the DS has the ability to play the same kinds of games that the 360, PS3, and Wii (a little less so) can. For the first time in over a decade, we're seeing canonic games of major series (and not just "handheld spinoffs") coming onto a handheld. Not only that, but it doesn't really feel like "just a handheld" anymore. The DS has things, above and beyond portability, that no other system can do... so there are reasons for purchasing it and playing it, even if your not interested in the portability. No other handheld system can claim this, outside a few very minor exceptions.
When I play a DS, it feels more like I'm playing a TV-based console, then a GBA. It's got a solid, robust design, the screen is incredibly clear, and it has full 3D graphics, that, for the screen resolution, can sit right next to the GameCube.
Just watch, many series are going to jump ship from TV-consoles. We're already seeing it start to happen.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
I play my DS at home. In fact, 90% of all of my play is at home. It works great! Here are the plusses of this platform:
When my wife is watching a movie, I can still sit next to her on the sofa and still play. No retreating to the other room.
Because the DS "pauses" when the screen is closed, I can open it up for 5-10 minutes of an RPG. This is one of the biggest selling points. With a console, you have to play until you get to a "save point," or risk looking your progress, or you could just pause and leave it on for a few days until you have enough time to get back to it. With a busy day, sometimes it is not even worth it to fire up the console.
The DS is also by far the cheapest of the "current" gaming hardware. $130 for a DS. $200 for a PSP. Consoles are $250 on up.
DS is the best seller for much the same reason that Toyotas sell better than BMW.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
I am a programmer, working for a game studio. My studio recently shipped a PSP game which is likely to be their last. My boss says that PSP is having abysmal sales figures, and is effectively a dead platform unless Sony pulls a rabbit out of their hat, and finds something to make buying a PSP worthwhile (low price point, AAA game that everyone has to have, etc.). It's not looking hopeful.
DS on the other hand has nothing but a bright future.
The DS is successful because it provides simplicity and compatibility in a low-cost package.
The DS is simple. I put in a game, I turn it on, I play it. I'm not told to join an online service, or pay for "points" for microtrasactions, or update firmware, or create a profile, or enter a password, or set up family accounts, or download patches, or view my online achievement scores, or update billing information, etc. (Note: it's true the DS can play over the internet using Wi-Fi, but the feature isn't very prominent and a lot of avid DS players don't even know about it). My DS is happy with being a little machine for games. It doesn't want to run my life, and I think a lot of casual-to-moderate gamers don't really want their console to become an online/entertainment hub. The games are the thing.
The DS is compatible. Not only does it have a lot of very nice games of its own, its backed by the massive Game Boy Advance library, with all sorts of treasures. I think pretty much everybody is getting the idea that backward-compatibility is the only way to go these days. While this is porbably good news for consumers (a PS3 is able to play 13 years worth of legacy games, for example) it'll be interesting to see if any other consoles are able to survive in such a market, building a stable of titles from the ground up. N-Gage, Gizmondo, and Zodiac all crashed and burned, for example.
The DS has a very very low entry price point. With a new DS lite running about $130 and a used original DS weighing in around $70 or so, the DS is by far the cheapest entry point to the current generation of systems. Unfortunately I think console manufacturers have lost sight of how much the public are really willing to pay for games, and the current console bunch (PS3 in particular) are prohibitively expensive for the masses. The people who make games and systems for a living tend to focus on those who eat, sleep, and breathe videogames, and forget that for every customer who would give up a kidney and wait in line for a week for a limited-edition Halo sequel in an exclusive holographic slipcase, there's a thousand parents who just want something fun for the kids to do on long car rides, or a suduku simulator to make the morning commute more bearable.
The current systems lineup offers something for everyone and an amount of diversity we've never seen before. Regardless of how it turns out, we're all in for a hell of a fun ride.
Andrew Lenahan http://www.starblind.com/
There's a problem with that logic. First of all, I wasn't a programmer on that project. I was working on something completely different. I've never written ANYTHING for PSP. Second of all, not every game has the same things going for it. AAA games get huge budgets, and multiple years to create. If you spend that much time on a project, it's usually going to be pretty good. If you rush a game to market in 8 months, it's probably not going to be spectacular. A small studio without a large budget is going to very rarely create an AAA game.