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Kids Prefer To Play Games On Mobile Devices Over Consoles
New submitter chloealsop writes: The NPD Group has published a report showing that more kids age 2-17 are playing games on phones and tablets than on consoles in the U.S.. 45 percent of kids use a home PC for gaming, a drop of 22 points since 2013. "The largest and most surprising shift in the 2015 gaming ecosystem was kids' move away from the computer," NPD Group analyst Liam Callahan said in a press release. "In the past, the computer was considered the entry point for gaming for most kids, but the game has changed now that mobile has moved into that position. This may be related to a change in the behavior of parents that are likely utilizing mobile devices for tasks that were once reserved for computers."
If one has access to entertainment in a package that is totally portable rather than one that anchors them to the wall, of course the portable option will be the favored one. Why is this news?
A cheap tablet is $50. Have 3 kids? $150 is not out of the reach of a majority. Most games are "free". Console? Even older ones $150 gets you one, no games. Games can be quite expensive. Requires a tv. Only one person gets to decide what is played. Throw phones into the equation and the game system is again "free". How is this news?
PC gaming is a larger market than all other platforms... COMBINED.
The problem is that no one owns it and so big companies like to push the notion that the PC is shit. They talk about Xbox or PS4 or mobile and ignore that while there are lots of people that do that, it isn't where the meat and potatoes are of the gaming world.
Mobile gaming being the future? F'ing candy crush? Okay. Believe what you like there.
PS/Xbox is the future? Even industry insiders are saying that the consoles have maybe one or two more generations left in them at most.
The PC however... never been stronger. So by all means... keep shitting on it.
It makes about as much sense as those dumb shit articles that were saying that business was going to stop using desktop computers and shift entirely to web applications on phones and ipads. These are the sorts of comments you expect from people that don't actually know what they're talking about.
If you understand gaming then you understand that the PC dominates and you understand why.
If you understand office programs... word processors, spread sheets, databases... then you know the desktop PC isn't going anywhere.
The people that suggest otherwise are clueless media nitwits or lying through their teeth corporate trolls trying to get people to use their crippled systems where they can jack up costs for no reason.
Cue console peasants telling me why consoles are great... I'd love to hear you so much as try you filthy fucking animals.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Can't exactly bring the console to Red Lobster, but you can bring the phone. It's not really about what's a better platform - it's what's available when kids have time to fill or be entertained. This is a dumb post...
It is tough to play games on a PC.
Why is this news?
Because it means kids are willing to forgo directional control (either arrow keys/WASD or a thumbstick) for a flat sheet of glass and its hard orientation toward point-and-click. And they're willing to forgo sharing an experience on the big screen for playing alone separately.
This is utterly ridiculous. I guarantee there are more kids playing PC games today, there are more kids playing Console games today, and EVERY freakin kid is playing phone games. Statistics get skewed and become meaningless... well... every time someone goes around quoting statistics. So just don't. Definitely don't turn them into clickbait headlines.
They don't prefer playing on mobile devices... they prefer watching others play on mobile devices!!!
Grandpa!!!
It's not surprising really - I'm a gamer and while I do still play games on the console and my PC my smartphone is just...convenient. The console requires sitting in front of the TV and not watching TV. Same with the PC (although a laptop is more flexible here if it's powerful enough for the game).
Portable games systems require carrying them along with you and while I've got a younger cousin that will carry both his smartphone and DS (and play games on his DS while watching Youtube videos on his phone) that's generally a hassle.
Smartphone? Always with me.
What do editors do here? Looks like a middle schooler wrote this.
For the submitters of Slashdot:
Please say this out loud to yourself before posting. If you wouldn't say it that way, it won't be written that way.
TMYK
console peasants telling me why consoles are great... I'd love to hear you so much as try
I've tried to sum up Team Peasant's strongest arguments in an article titled Consoles are easy. In case you don't want to click through, what consoles lose in flexibility they gain in ease:
Easy to choose For system requirements, either you have the platform or you don't. And there's less crap in the stores. Crap on Atari 2600 almost killed the North American video game industry in 1983-84. Easy to use Turn it on and go. No driver headaches. No time wasted mapping buttons on a USB/BT generic HID controller. Works offline without losing the offline mode credentials after a month. No mods means less chance of online cheating. Easy to afford One console, one TV, two extra controllers, and one copy of four $60 games is cheaper than three gaming PCs, three monitors, and three copies of four $40 games. Disc games mean no risk of hitting your ISP's cap.Can't exactly bring the console to Red Lobster
If you want to bring your console to Pinocchio's favorite restaurant (source: chapter 13), sure you can. Just make sure it's a PlayStation Vita.
Also, no console tax.
Is the console tax really that much more than the 30 percent tax that Google, Amazon, and Apple charge in their respective app stores? No. In fact, it's exactly the same, as Apple announced an App Store with a 30 percent tax months after Microsoft announced Xbox Live Indie Games with a 30 percent tax.
Jeeze! Now I know why they always look cross-eyed... People are gonna look pretty weird in 40 years.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Us techies always think it's about power or performance, but mobility is a transformative feature. Many people prioritize it over nearly every customer experience feature we can offer in products today. It's largely why Apple came to dominate smartphones. They offered the world's most mobile handheld computer first.
If I were Microsoft or Sony, I would be very worried. Most of my gaming time used to be on PC games. Then I progressed to consoles and now nearly all of my gaming time is on my iPad or iPhone with minimal laptop time for games not on iOS. Smart gaming companies are already pivoting into mobile gaming where the majority of the money is in the gaming industry.
Why couldn't they just as well share the PC?
That depends on how many good games support using two to four controllers plugged into a USB hub. I've seen some games whose console version allows shared-screen multiplayer but whose PC version allows only LAN or online multiplayer. And a lot of games designed around a shared screen rarely if ever leave consoles. Bomberman hasn't seen a PC native release outside East Asia since the Windows 95 era, and 4-player platform fighters tend to be stuck on a console even if they aren't first-party like Super Smash Bros. series or PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale. Perhaps the only hope for shared-screen multiplayer on PC is indie titles like Duck Game.
mobility is a transformative feature. [...] If I were Microsoft or Sony, I would be very worried.
I don't see why. Microsoft has Windows Phone and Sony has PlayStation Vita. If those companies have mismanaged their mobile platforms, it's their loss.
I'm shocked. I really had no idea. Seeing kids locked into their mobile devices 24/7 did nothing to clue me in.
In the article summary, the first reference is to 'phones and tablets vs. consoles' but then the whole rest of the summary is about 'mobile versus PCs'.
Am I to take from this that kids play games on mobile first, and consoles are just plain over, so the only thing to compare mobile gaming against is PC gaming?
It's unclear, because the way I view it is that there are three categories of gaming: Mobile, Console, and PC gaming.
When I hang out at the kind of place that favors Console gaming (Gamestop or used gaming shots that sell disks and carts) console gaming seems to be 'on top.' When I go to an appstore it's apparent that lots of games (many of them really crappy and suboptimal because who wants to rub their knuckles against a flat piece of glass for hours?) are available on Mobile. When I visit a website like Steam or Gog.com, it becomes apparent there is a thriving market for PC games.
This is nice and all, but here is a few things.
This is the first generation to have mobile phone games. We never had something like this before. Plus the cost of smart phones are high, so in the past a console was an easy Xmas present every 5 years, but now cell phones are replaced every year.
Not to mention almost everyone is using a smartphone all the time now. I can't walk down the street without finding at least 50% of the people watching their phone.
So ya, we have these cool smartphones that can do a fucking lot of shit and almost everyone is using them all the time.
Kids, fuck, what do they know?
Be seeing you...
You just don't realize it. You're not anywhere near as in control as you think you are. Like it or not advertising works. Not always, but lot and lots of times. It's especially effective on kids. Out of spite you might personally block your kids from consoles if you become aware that it's the advertising that makes them interested, but if so you're very much in the minority. Your opinions, beliefs and desires were heavily shaped while you were young and vulnerable, and so are your kids. The advertisers are more interested in iPad games because they're cheaper to make and just as profitable as an aggregate whole. We'll all do as we say because as kids we literally can't think for ourselves. That's why in the 60s and 70s Mr Rogers and others fought against advertising directed at children, and it's also why they lost.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
For multiple players to work on a single screen [without causing motion sickness], it has to be something fairly simple, like tennis with a fixed camera
Many shared-screen games, such as fighting games and whatever Bomberman is, do have a mostly fixed camera. If anything, they just move the camera side-to-side and possibly zoom out when the characters get too far apart. But I'll grant that co-op adventure games such as The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon might be a bit more prone to causing motion sickness in susceptible people.
who gives a fuck about gaming shitty ass 2D games on tablets, smartphones, etc?
these guys don't even know what gaming is. they're claiming that entry level gaming is playing some type of retarded 2D game, side scroller, or puzzle game that the majority don't consider real games.
real games are complete PC games as sold on steam that cannot even be replicated on mobile devices, because mobile devices are so slow and cumbersome and are basically too shitty. meanwhile Nintendo 3DS has some real games - mobile phones don't. Also home consoles have real games. But mobile devices don't.
This indicates that real games are only being made for PC, and consoles. Mobile devices continue to only carry crappy ass casual games as mentioned before, that are simply not real games. I cannot even believe someone has elevated that class of game, to console or PC game category. Period.
It's akin to saying that anyone who plays the little 'snake' game or poker game that was on old cellphones is a "gamer."
Also this article headline said that people were moving away from consoles, but then it talks about PC gamers switching from PC to cellphone.. PC's are not consoles. sorry.
Also anyone who plays crappy Java based or flash based games, ie Pool on yahoo games or scrable on yahoo games, is not a gamer either. Seriously. That title is reserved for people who play World of Warcraft, Quake, Fallout, Zelda, Mario, or other real fucking games.
Bejeweled or Angry Birds are not real fucking games, at all.
"Kids Prefer To Play Games On Mobile Devices Over Consoles "
"The NPD Group has published a report showing that more kids age 2-17 are playing games on phones and tablets than on consoles in the U.S.. 45 percent of kids use a home PC for gaming, a drop of 22 points since 2013. "The largest and most surprising shift in the 2015 gaming ecosystem was kids' move away from the computer," NPD Group analyst Liam Callahan said in a press release. "In the past, the computer was considered the entry point for gaming for most kids, but the game has changed now that mobile has moved into that position. This may be related to a change in the behavior of parents that are likely utilizing mobile devices for tasks that were once reserved for computers.""
headline should match blurb :D
obamasweapon.com
every kid got a mobile phone, lots of them don't own a game console - and even if they do, they have access to their phone for much longer. i spend more time on my mobile but i still prefer consoles and computers.
You're thinking too small. It's a broader shift in all of computing. Mobile devices have been replacing desktops for just about every purpose. Right now, if I had to choose to go without my home PC (actually macbook, haven't owned a desktop PC in a decade) or without my phone, I wouldn't even have to think about it; keep the phone. For work, for any type of content creation, I want a keyboard, mouse, and full size screen. But for consumption, mobile devices are ideal.
Child labour laws don't prevent children from working and earning money, it just limits what they can do and how much they can work.
And until 16, that's pretty close to zero, even during summer vacation in jurisdictions that have one. I'll summarize the situation in Indiana:
So unless the parent teaches the child how to seek out those few jobs available to a child under 16, the child is out of luck. In fact, my parents actively discouraged me from such. Nor are children allowed to drive a car to and from work.
Also, don't you give your children an allowance?
A lot of parents restrict what their children can buy with an allowance. From a legal standpoint, they don't give the child an allowance as much as allocate an allowance to a trust benefiting the child. Besides, children don't own real estate in which to store a modern console. "My house, my rules."
Console games but only once they reach a reasonable price point. $7.50 average buy price.
I used to try that. But by the time a PlayStation 2 game hit the bargain bin, its online features would likely have been shut off permanently. Google DNAS error 103. Has this been fixed on PlayStation 4?
Right now, if I had to choose to go without my home PC (actually macbook, haven't owned a desktop PC in a decade) or without my phone, I wouldn't even have to think about it; keep the phone. For work, for any type of content creation, I want a keyboard, mouse, and full size screen. But for consumption, mobile devices are ideal.
The implicit connotations of the term "content consumption" make me feel uneasy. I prefer "creating works" and "viewing works created by others". Now with that out of the way:
Having to choose between a PC and a phone, one or the other, discourages people from even attempting to create works. In fact, if someone is unable to create works for long enough, the situation frames his thoughts into a sort of Stockholm syndrome where he wouldn't even conceive of attempting to create works and becomes more willing to accept restrictions on creating works. That's why for now I carry a small laptop and a flip phone.
ability to mod(which; given USB is available on all consoles; if modding were that important; we'd have it on consoles).
I think the inability to mod is in large part caused by console makers' unwillingness to allow any unapproved executable code to execute. Otherwise, amateur users could make a "total conversion" of some game that would in theory compete with other licensed developers' products. The closest you'll get to official moddability on a console are probably those few games that put an internal level editor front and center, such as LittleBigPlanet, WarioWare DIY, and Super Mario Maker. And even those don't let the user import assets created in a PC program.
I'm an Xbox gamer so I'm not sure about PS. On Xbox the major titles will sometimes have dedicated servers that shutdown but more often the XBL service is available for matchmaking, sometimes it has both systems, dedicated for certain types of gameplay and XBL matchmaking for the rest. To give you an idea of the frequency, about 800 of 50,500 achievements are discontinued from servers shutting down.
I agree: When Xbox, Nintendo DS, and Wii matchmaking, shut down the vast majority of it shut down at the same time for the whole platform. So how long does Xbox Live matchmaking for Xbox 360 have left?
I have a 5 year old and a 2 year old. The 2 year old is a Peppa Pig addict, but it's not just any old peppa pig. Oh noes, it's "I watch Piggies on daddies phone!" "no darling" "I watch Piggies on daddies tablet", then weirdly it is "I watch Piggies on daddies 'puter" and then finally once all other options have been attempted it will finally be "I watch piggies on tv in the lounge!"
The 5 year old given half a chance would be surgically attached to the tablet. Managing their screen time is something we have to do everyday, which is a little sad.
I agree: When Xbox, Nintendo DS, and Wii matchmaking, shut down the vast majority of it shut down at the same time for the whole platform. So how long does Xbox Live matchmaking for Xbox 360 have left?
I don't think it will shut down. The service is ubiquitous between all of its platforms so even GFWL is still able to use XBL matchmaking where it hasn't been patched out.
Children are not fully formed human beings.
You can't take the sky from me
I have this beautiful vision of console gamers playing bad ports of mobile games, tearing their hair out over shitty interfaces, poor graphics, and the fact that their TVs are not, in fact, touchscreens. And the mobile players calling them 'elitists' for saying that a controller is more precise than smudging your fingers everywhere.
12 year olds can manage a PC
It's not necessarily whether you are capable of managing a gaming PC as whether you are willing to spend time doing so.
if you can't handle a PC for gaming effortlessly then you have no business commenting on /.
Sadly, the Slashdot population alone does not make a video game or gaming platform profitable. This means it's not whether I personally can build and maintain a gaming PC as much as whether a substantial number of people can.
A lot of mobile games are the type of game I used to play as a child, the puzzle and simple platformer and racer games. Not everybody likes the kind of games that consoles are primarily known for these days, like Halo, Grand Theft Auto, Assassin's Creed, Call of Duty etc. Yes, I know Nintendo is still known for the casual games, but mobile devices are a much better value for casual and simple games. Consoles are the equivalent of dumb but good looking people, while on mobile, it's all about the gameplay.
For the record, I'm not the jerk. I'm not even a parent. The fictional parents in my example are a composite of parents I've met and read about. But I wholeheartedly agree with you that they're jerks. But the question remains: What is a child with jerk parents supposed to do?
more often the XBL service is available for matchmaking, sometimes it has both systems, dedicated for certain types of gameplay and XBL matchmaking for the rest.
this is even worse. XBL or PSN cost $50/year. F that! they can KMA.
But is this comfort worth buying three copies of each game for a household?
Why would I do that? My friends are already going to have their own copies
Because a parent is often the source of all these copies for a household.
If it were, then critics wouldn't have panned the Turbo Touch 360 controller so hard. How would you control, say, Mega Man series on a touch screen?
Did the Turbo Touch 360 guys have access to the Mega Man source code so that they could make a control layout that worked well?
Hypothetical: Let's say I get a contract with Capcom, and I've been given the source code for Mega Man 2. I've already got it ported to a modern assembler (ca65), and I've built enough NES compatibility infrastructure in an Android app that I can interpret the 6502 code and MMC1 paging commands and translate NES PPU display lists to Android display commands. It works great with a Bluetooth keyboard. Now all I have to do is fill port $4016 with move, jump, and fire commands. So how do I translate touch start, touch move, and touch end events that the Android OS provides into move, jump, and fire commands in a way comfortable for the player?
more often the XBL service is available for matchmaking, sometimes it has both systems, dedicated for certain types of gameplay and XBL matchmaking for the rest.
this is even worse. XBL or PSN cost $50/year. F that! they can KMA.
I can't speak to PSN but XBL you now get 48 free games per year to keep (I think PSN is more games per year but you don't get to keep them, once your subscription lapses you lose everything).
"The largest and most surprising shift in the 2015 gaming ecosystem was kids' move away from the computer,"
Newsflash, phones are computers ...
it's not about keeping the games, it's about the online matchmaking or other stuff like GTA V online. F that, I repeat!
I DO think it will shut down for xbox 360 whenever it feels convenient for Microsoft,
as it has ALREADY been shut down for the xbox for years. Even your gamertag gets lost.
What a shame.
I don't think it will shut down. The service is ubiquitous between all of its platforms
So then why did they shut it down for the original Xbox? People were still paying for that!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Please Parent you're children. Kids should not be playing games on phones or consoles. They should be outside playing. At least until age 13. Check out Waldorf Education to really help your kids out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldorf_education
I think this misses the obvious point:
Kids play games on what they have. Why would a kid want a 300-600$ game console or 2000$ computer that they can only play at home when they could have a 1000$ smartphone or tablet that does just about everything they could ever want to do to waste time with?
Like, before there were computers, kids played with blocks, tinkertoys, LEGO and Barbies. Imagination was worth a lot. Today it's not. You can just be handed someone elses story and enjoy it without asking too many questions.
Games largely fall into two categories:
Activity games that do not require a time commitment (which is the majority of iOS games, and some Wii U/3DS games)
and
Games that require a significant time commitment (MMORPG's being at the top, all RPG and FPS games)
A kid who can not read is not going to invest time in a game unless it's fully voiced. Otherwise they would just rather play stuff that is within their realm of playing like Angry Birds or Minecraft. They can put it down and come back at any time.
Anyone over the age of 12 knows that the PC is where games go to die. It's the last platform (short of ending up on the Mac or Linux) after a game has been out on the Xbox or Playstation for 2-25 years.
Mobile games let you do something for 5 minutes, and then go do something else.
Now, as for are mobile games any good? The consensus is that game developers produce a lot more shovelware on Android than they do on Windows. iOS is a bit better. Generally all games are developed for iOS first, and then only brought to Android due to greed, and that's when the game is pirated to hell and you stop making any money on it. You release on Steam last, since even though Steam prevents Piracy, it's also trivially easy to crack steam games.
That's what TrueAchievements/TrueTrophies is for - setting up times to meet with people and play. I rarely have trouble finding people for any game and because it's a pre-set group you don't have to sit around waiting for matchmaking to occur.
They shutdown Xbox but that was a completely different service. Microsoft execs have already stated that they want you to be able to pick up your games in 25 years and still be able to play them.
No time wasted mapping buttons on a USB/BT generic HID controller.
can't remember the last time I did that with my 360 controller
That's because game developers hardcoded a special case button layout for your brand of controller. There are too many available makes and models of controller for PC and mobile for game developers to be able to special-case everything's button layouts. With a console, on the other hand, either your controller is automatically configured or it's incompatible. This is a yes-or-no proposition easily understood by the majority of the market that does not use Slashdot.
not really quite a lot of cheaters abound on console and pc platforms
How do modern PC games work around aimbots, wallhacks, and the like?
being able to have three computers capable of doing much more then just playing games/browsing the web
I guess it depends on how many games you play and whether they come with some sort of quantity discount for a home LAN.
Disc games mean no risk of hitting your ISP's cap.
hasn't been playing attention to more recent console games
All tested PS4 games worked without having to go online and download the patch.
It wasn't a forward thinking service when it started, it was a get it up and running to learn what they needed to. They learned and applied it so that they could create a service that was forward thinking and is compatible with any platform; which is why it works for 9 different platforms now.
Gaming, up until about 5-7 years ago, has always been heavily dominated by males. Mobile games and Facebook games have made it more socially acceptable for girls to game, whereas previously it was a "boy" thing. Based on the extremely high percentage points in all the game categories, its likely a simple polling of all kids instead of kids who responded to a gaming-specific survey. As such, the decreases may be somewhat artificial - more people are identifying as gamers because of casual games rather than significant playerbase reductions on consoles and PCs.
That's a dumb question because the PS4 has been out slightly less than 3 years. Ask again in 5 years, but it is probably fixed since PSN is centralized now.
They learned and applied it so that they could create a service that was forward thinking and is compatible with any platform; which is why it works for 9 different platforms now.
What would make it platform-specific to begin with? Did they in fact throw away the original system, or just incrementally improve it?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
They learned and applied it so that they could create a service that was forward thinking and is compatible with any platform; which is why it works for 9 different platforms now.
What would make it platform-specific to begin with? Did they in fact throw away the original system, or just incrementally improve it?
I would suspect that it was improved and the issue was primarily around how to update it without breaking compatibility between platforms. The XBL service is more than just matchmaking, it's also DRM/licensing which needs to be updated more often than communication protocols.
Because LEGO Dimensions appears not to be coming to PC.
Xbox Live for Xbox games was forked to make Xbox Live for Xbox 360 games. Microsoft ran into limits of the original Xbox Live architecture, such as limits on the friends list, that it couldn't easily patch into existing Xbox games.
You make a good point. So let me ask another question taking that into account: Is online multiplayer still running on older PlayStation 3 games? That console has been out for nearly nine years, so there should be a larger sample indicative of SCE's intent going forward.
I'm aware of the potentially undesirable association between the term "PC Master Race" and the ideology of a German administration responsible for some of the most atrocious war crimes of the twentieth century. In order to help myself and the rest of Slashdot get away from this framing, first please let me clarify the reasoning behind my own use of "peasant" and "master".
I have intended it as an analogy for who has control over a given piece of computing machinery. The term "peasant" literally means a tenant farmer. A peasant works land leased from a landlord and must obey the landlord's rules. "Master", by contrast, means one who is his own lord. Likewise, console gamers must obey the console makers' rules, but PC gamers control their own machines. If you are your own master, you can install mods or even (if you're inclined) make mods.
If you can think of a better analogy than ownership of agricultural land, I'm interested.
Good question! For most it is still working. IIRC the only PS3 games I have that don't have online play working is Civilization Revolution, which for some strange reason used Gamespy and NOT PSN and the PS3 Ghostbusters game (Atari chose to shut them down)
Everything else seems fine, though the hard part with some older games is that they often don't have "lobbies" so it's hard to find people to play with. Sadly, SCEA never got the idea to use Home as a lobby for lobbyless games.
It's a lot easier to find people playing on the PS4. (and the future "Communities" feature will help too)
1. More kids are being given their parents' phones to play with while they're out and about - there's now a way to satisfy more of the gaming demand than before, and more opportunities for mobile games to be played where PC/Console games could not.
2. Most mobile devices fit into kids' hands better than a keyboard or a video game controller.
3. Mobile game controls are dynamic - they're designed around the game being played. There is less need to learn how to use the controller/equipment properly.
4. The games are all available at once, easy to locate and run with no need to type/search/physically load media. Just swipe, tap, and you're in.
So how would the control scheme designed by "someone else who could do the job" work?