Why Has No One Made a Great Gaming Phone?

andylim writes "According to Engadget, John Koller, Sony's head of PlayStation marketing, recently said that 'Apple's entrance into the portable gaming space has been a net positive for Sony. When people want a deeper, richer console, they start playing on a PSP.' What's odd though is that everyone knows that the mobile phone gaming market is a huge and yet neither Sony nor Nintendo has made a gaming phone yet. Recombu.com thinks that Nokia could enter the space with PSP-like devices and it has come up with a concept phone called the Ovi Orion, which would bridge the gap between phone and console, 'If the iPhone is Wii, then Ovi Orion would be Xbox and offer Xbox Live style features. A serious gaming phone for serious gamers.'"

Comments

Because

[brian0918]

Because phones are for TALKING. :P

Re:Because

[radish]

I use my phone for texting, web, facebook, twitter, maps/navigation, ssh, games, exercise/nutrition tracking, barcode scanning, comparison shopping and whatever else takes my fancy. I make an actual voice call maybe once a week, so it's one of the least important features for me (although it does have to work of course).

People are different and have different needs. Although to be honest there's very little chance I'd buy some kind of specialised gaming phone.

They did

[jimbobborg]

There was a gaming phone a few years back. It flopped. No one revisited.

Because...

[TheKidWho]

The kids who play the games can't afford the service plans or phones themselves...

Most adults have other things to do, or more powerful systems at home to play "serious" games on.

meh.

[milkmage]

serious gaming? on a mobile device? c'mon. games on a phone are at best, distractions or time killers (babysitters).

the LAST thing I want to do is get heavy into a game and get a fucking call.

Because ....

[phoxix]

You can buy a DS/PSP without a freaking multi-year ass-rape contract.

Buying a gaming console should never be a long term financial decision.

Now your pockets are bulging

[tepples]

Keep the cheap phones for making phone calls and the game computers for playing games.

One device for browsing the web, one for playing music, one for watching video, one for playing games, and one for making calls. Now your pockets are bulging, even if they are all tethered over Bluetooth. The only big benefit I can see of having several pocket-size devices is that the cheaper phones don't require a data plan, which means cheaper service if you don't make a lot of calls.

Re:Now your pockets are bulging

[grahamtriggs]

Pockets full of devices? I can't see why. Two devices would be perfectly reasonable - one for things that demand connectivity (talk, text, net), and one for the other stuff (games, videos, music). Even if the 'other stuff' has occasional connectivity capabilities to download new music, etc.

When people say phones are for talking, it's not a frivolous argument - they need to be available for talking. Which has two implications:

1) What should happen when you have an incoming call? Do you lose your position in game, etc?

2) The battery needs to stand up to the demands.

As it is, 3G devices struggle to get through a day. It's not going to help matters by gaming on them for an hour or two - pushing the cpu, graphics, display to the limit. If your games console runs out of juice, it's generally less of an issue than if you suddenly can't make or receive calls.

The problem with gaming phones

[Tetsujin]

This is why Sony nor Nintendo should be looking to create a gaming phone, they should be looking to create PSP/DS with phone capabilities. Otherwise it's just going to fail.

Actually, I really don't think so. The time will come where what you say is correct, but I believe now is not the time. Here's why.

Basically, both phones and portable game systems are, in terms of their hardware and software, and the expectations of the users, continually evolving. However, I think phones are still evolving faster than game systems. New telephony technologies continue to be rolled out, network coverage in the US is still inconsistent between carriers and spotty in some places, and the iPhone, which is the item by which most people have set their standards and expectations for a high-end phone, is at present just a few years old - and has already gone through a couple revisions. Compare this to Nintendo DS and Sony PSP: DS has gone through two major hardware revisions in five years, and only the most recent of those changed the hardware specs significantly. The situation for the PSP is similar: roughly the same amount of time, and a similar amount of change to the platform over time.

I think that combining a phone with a gaming device at this time would probably still be a bad idea. Turning a phone into a game platform involves more than adding game controls to it - it means turning it into a platform stable enough that players and game publishers will be willing to invest themselves in it. Game platforms stay the same for years so that publishers can make money on software. Phones, at present anyway, are still caught up in a mad rush to one-up one another. A game machine with phone capabilities could be good now, but a couple years down the road its capabilities as a phone would practically be a joke. This doesn't preclude establishing a stable game system as a subset of a particular phone line's capabilities - but then the "game platform" games would be inferior to the "phone native" games or something like that...