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Nintendo's Big-Screen 3DS XL Meets Lukewarm Reception
MojoKid writes "Nintendo took the wraps off its new, super-sized 3DS XL handheld on Friday, but reactions have been anything but enthusiastic. The new DS offers a larger set of screens (4.88 inches top / 4.18" bottom), better battery life, and will ship with a copy of New Super Marios 2 but it's launching into a very different market than what the original DS XL faced in 2009. The 3DS XL's battery improvements aren't just icing on the cake — they're seen as remedying a critical problem with the current handheld. It also won't support the second circle pad added by the Circle Pad Pro, which implies Nintendo is ready to kill that peripheral altogether. The other major problem is that a larger screen isn't really what the 3DS needed in order to be more successful."
... in order to be more successful was for the iPad never to have been invented.
Wrong market.
Portable game systems are generally aimed at younger audiences and are built for immersion. The games tend to qualify as "games" rather than "time wasters", the sort of stuff you get on the app store doesn't compare to full RPGs or platformers with 20-60 hours of play.
The 3DS' problem was, and is, that it sucks. The 3D is not a big enough gimmick to make people want to leave their almost-the-same DS behind. Nintendo sold a butt-ton of DS consoles, the 3DS has better CPU/GPU/RAM but the crap battery life and price hurt that badly. Nintendo should have just come up with something new instead of riding the 3DTV bandwagon, they're at their best (Wii) when they stop playing follow the leader.
As someone who played every Zelda and every Final Fantasy out there, I must say that yes, they are 30x more fun than Angry Birds and any free/freemium/5$ RPG I found on the app market.
No, but its certainly enough to hurt Nintendo(and to a lesser extent Sony) by attacking 2 of their key markets, retro and casual games.
First look at Retro, Square has actually been doing a lot of pioneering in this territory. All their FF famicom games have already been released for iOS(and most if not all for Android IIRC), and FF Tactics seems to be doing pretty well as well. Now RPGs are more suited to touchscreens as you dont necessarily need to react to everything in real time, but a lot of companies are having success releasing retro games for portables.
The other, perhaps for Nintendo even more important market segment is casual games, esp. those for adults. The DS was able to mop the floor with the PSP in terms of total units shipped largely because they appealed to the casual gamer, but the casual gamer is moving in droves to cell phones, largely because for them its one less thing to carry.
Cell phones will never be a complete replacement for consoles, but they can still do a lot of damage to the portable market..... While this generation of portables is still quite young, it will be interesting to see if Sony's play for the more hardcore portable gamer ends up paying off as that kind of gamer is much less apt to choose a cell phone over a console.
Monstar L