Future of Gaming: PS Vita vs. Nintendo 3DS – Where is the Battle?

Well avid gamers, and those who are reading this because your current lecture isn’t exactly the most fascinating thing on this planet, you may have heard that Sony have released the long awaited sequel to their Playstation Portable system – the PS Vita. Oh, you didn’t hear about it, you didn’t camp out in front of the electronics store to get it on midnight of launch day? That’s not a problem, because it doesn’t look like anyone else did either.

For the last few years people have been talking about the eventual successor to the PSP. Would it also be a phone? Would it abandon the failing UMD format in favour of digital downloads or more common flash-based memory cards? What would the graphics be like – PS2 level or something to truly rival the PS3 and really shake the mobile gaming market? My biggest requirement in a new PSP (which I have mentioned countless times in this column over the years) was the inclusion of a second analog stick. For years I debated buying a PSP, both for the games and the media player capabilities, but the inability to fully mimic the controller scheme of a console always stopped me, and now that it is finally available? Well, to be honest, I really don’t care anymore.

I don’t think that it’s just me either; I think a fundamental shift is occurring in portable gaming and the days of a dedicated portable gaming system are ending. I have mentioned the failure of the Nintendo 3DS already in previous articles, but I was waiting to see if the PS Vita would prove my theory wrong. The 3DS was a commercial disaster, and this was readily admitted by Nintendo when they drastically dropped the price of the unit within a few months of its release. I was hoping that this failure was the result of Nintendo oversaturating the market with new versions of the DS, just think about how many versions there have actually been. There was the original DS, the DS lite, DSi, and the DS XL, all of which were pretty substantial changes to both the hardware and the built-in software, and then they added the 3DS. With each successive version, Nintendo has taken the same marketing approach that Apple is famous for – showing you that the newest version is the only one that will make you the most popular, and that anything else is just old technology. But Nintendo jumped the gun by employing this same strategy to promote a new version of the DS which was based entirely on the new 3D technology. While many people flock to theatres to watch the newest blockbuster 3D movie each summer, they aren’t exactly rushing out to spend the money on 3D TVs and glasses. 3D is still a technology that many people seem to view as being unproven and too expensive – really only for those early adopters with the money to spend, and the insanity to match. I’m really talking about the big screen TVs with the $100 glasses. Computer monitors and passive 3D technology are readily available and reasonably priced right now – so don’t think I’m entirely against 3D – I’m not, I own a 3D PC monitor. The real problem is that Nintendo’s market is still mainly composed of children, and parents aren’t very likely to spend their money on a new DS that uses costly and unproven technology (there are currently tests going on to look at possible health effects) for their kid.

I hoped that the new PSP would have a much stronger launch than the 3DS because it is a very substantial change to a line that really hasn’t seen that much change over the years. True, there have been revisions to the PSP that included larger and higher resolution screens, better battery life, or a better processor, but you could still pass someone on the street carrying a PSP and not know if it was a first generation or a fourth. Sony tried to shake things up with the PSP Go, which was an entirely digital distribution based system, but other than the removal of the UMD slot (and the ability to play some games as a result) there really weren’t any changes. The PSP Go has pretty much failed by this point as well. The PS Vita appeared to have the ability to revitalize the traditional portable gaming market, but then release day came and went. There were no news stories about people lining up for the new system, there weren’t any riots when the stores sold out, and there wasn’t even much of a stir on video game news sites.

If Sony cannot stir up excitement about the new system and boost sales, I’m guessing that the PS Vita will soon see a substantial price drop similar to the 3DS.

Now it is time for both Sony and Nintendo to admit defeat in the portable gaming market. It hasn’t been stolen by another competitor – Microsoft never even challenged either of the giants. Instead, it has fallen to smartphones and mobile gaming. If Sony and Nintendo want to still make the kind of portable games we have seen for years on the DS and PSP, they are going to have to start developing games for Apple and Android phones. They need to abandon the idea of producing their own system in favour of producing the games that play on someone else’s technology – similar to what SEGA did when they abandoned console manufacturing. People are still willing to spend the money on a home gaming console and $50 – 60 for a game, but they are no longer willing to pay that kind of money for a portable game. Similar to flash games on the Internet, $1 games are what most mobile gamers are playing now, but the capability is there in many current smartphones to run a game with PS2 level graphics – there just needs to be a company out there developing that game.

I haven’t really mentioned Microsoft that much in this article and that is mainly because they never really entered the portable gaming market. Even though there were rumours, speculation, and plenty of people willing to open their wallets for an Xbox Portable, Microsoft never took the leap. Maybe that was because they were hoping that Windows Phone would become the next big competitor to Apple, but they might have lost out to Android at this point. I personally think that Microsoft has probably been looking into portable gaming for many years but maybe they saw the trend towards mobile gaming earlier because they were viewing it from the outside. Sony and Nintendo are both stuck inside the dying genre of portable gaming, and they each have products that are doing reasonably well, but aren’t making them huge profits – and probably never will. Eventually they are going to have to accept their losses and branch out into other genres of gaming – maybe developing the next Playstation or the new Wii. Oh wait, isn’t the Wii U coming out soon? Whatever happened to it?

To end this off, if you did actually buy a PS Vita when it came out – congratulations, let me know what you think of it and just think, you may be the owner of a very rare product if they end up canning the system. Seriously though, enjoy the games and support the system if you like it. To everyone else, I’m going to grab my phone and play some Plants vs. Zombies now, Keep on Gaming.