Everyone Thought Mobile Would Kill Game Consoles. Here’s Why That Didn’t Happen

Everyone Thought Mobile Would Kill Game Consoles. Here's Why That Didn't Happen 1

Why didn’t Wired’s 2012 prediction that game consoles would die because of mobile come true? Originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

Everyone Thought Mobile Would Kill Game Consoles. Here's Why That Didn't Happen 2

This author fell into a common trap for predicting technology markets (actually growth patterns). There is a natural tendency to extrapolate linear, unbounded growth. People can add an inflection point and adapt their thinking to exponential growth when they see it, like Moore’s Law or the expansion of the internet. But, for some reason, people don’t do well putting a second inflection point in the curve, and they rarely predict leveling off.

In 2012, smartphones were growing at an astronomical rate. Gaming was a prime application for them, as many other handy applications, like mobile messaging, VoIP calls, web browsing, and social media. This led many people to think all of the above would shift to almost completely portable, and alternative platforms would die.

But, there are a few problems with that, and for gaming, they are pronounced:

  • From an HCI (human-computer interaction) perspective, a standard smartphone can’t provide the user interfaces to control and visually process higher-end games.
  • High-end games are very resource-intensive applications. The power needed to run one would murder a phone’s battery to the point of impracticality, even if a user could properly interact with it. You could certainly have accessories to at least partly address that (like a big supplementary battery pack), but you quickly lose the mobility advantage once you go that route. The same is true of the GPU systems high-end games need.
  • From a business perspective, mobile gaming revenues were not climbing at the same rate as mobile adoption. When there isn’t money to be made, the companies with the best IP aaren’t incentivizedsh harder into it. While it was a strategic area for all the gaming companies, and most were bullish on it, the way the mobile app marketplaces evolved, with freemium and meager prices being the norm, didn’t support gaming companies’ console game marketplace.
  • Mobile was growing the gaming market and claiming the lion’s share of that gain. Like the PSP and NDS, mobile consoles were bound to get crushed, but many people using their phones for games were new to it or were coming from casual games, which are a non-factor on consoles. As such, the growth of mobile gaming was not much at the expense of consoles.

 

The bottom line: consoles (or gaming PCs) are still necessary for high-end games, and mobile-only took a small share of that. Some people can’t afford both, and some have given up high-end games for more casual ones, but for the most part, people who want to play the Battlefields and FIFAs of the world aren’t able to replace that with their phones. Now, real VR consoles, on the other hand.

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