PCs disguised as portable consoles. Will this be the future of mobile gaming?
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Do you remember Game & Watch? Also known as harps for many of us, they are the first real memory of a portable console. Liquid crystal technology, rubber buttons on the sides, equipped with “clock” mode to become bedside alarm clocks. Nintendo was behind it. We are almost ten years before the Game Boy and then, in 1980, they represented the first real mobile video game idea. The look was that of the calculator, they were battery operated and became a global phenomenon. Sales exceeded 40 million units (a quarter only in Japan) a resounding success if we count that Nintendo Switch, in some ways the great-granddaughter, reached 125 million, becoming the third best-selling console in history after Playstation 2 and Nintendo Ds which is in all respects the most successful portable gaming machine ever.
Yesterday’s Game & Watch has become an industry today. And tomorrow they will be confronted – always at a distance – with conceptually similar but different products such as Playstation’s Project Q. The one arriving at the end of the year looks more like a second screen that replaces the TV than an autonomous portable console.
This is to say that mobile gaming is a more complex ecosystem than expected. Primarily because it has withstood the impact of smartphones. In 2007, with the invention of the iPhone and the app economy, mobile phones were candidates to become the gateway to mobile gaming, which is by far the most economically consistent item in the entire video game market. It means 93 billion dollars a year out of a total of 180, more than half.
If we restrict the field to Italy thanks to the data of the latest report by Iidea (Italian Interactive & Digital Entertainment Association) we find that smartphone (and tablet) players spend 5.2 hours on videogame screens against just under two on consoles portable. More than double the time. In other words – wanting to sketch a bit of video game sociology – the vast majority of non-gamers come into contact with gaming via smartphone. The mobile phone is the main entrance door. Even if it’s not hardware designed for gaming. It is awkward, slips and has no buttons and analog sticks.
In the last ten years, accessories have appeared to make a mobile phone similar to a portable console. Which is a bit like disguising a console smartphone badly. Super-bodied and super-powerful smartphones such as the Asus Rog Phones were also born to support the most demanding games with graphics and calculations. And only recently have more vertical next-generation portable consoles entered the market.
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