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Comment by ThatPlayer | Hacker News Reader

Wiped out most of the pocket-sized handheld gaming market too. Not because phones are better at gaming, but they're "good enough" entertainment with social media, streaming, music, etc.

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Which is a shame IMHO I really love(d) my DS/3DS wish they still made that form factor, you can't exactly carry a switch in your pocket.

There are gameboy pocket sized devices made still that run emulators. But you’re stuck with no new games and grey area legality

I love emulating old games, but let's be clear: by grey area legality you mean illegal, right :)

Unless you're dumping ROMs yourself of games you own...

They do run Linux, so sometimes new games can be made to work on them, like the new TMNT Shredder's Revenge: https://youtu.be/DpVwO8Z8z-E . And some newer devices can run Android for new games there.

I really really wish that apple / google / samsung came out with official hardware game pads that snapped to the phones and had direct support at the os level for game developers to easily support. We're missing out on so many good handheld experiences by being limited to touch only.

Razer's Kishi is pretty good and it just works (on Android games that support it, the majority are expecting touch only).

Except what do you do about sound? Bluetooth (audio) has way too high latency for gaming

USB is good enough for real-time music on iOS and many Android phones. If you want to already snap the controller to the phone, adding a plug isn't much trouble. And some phones still have the 3.5mm jack.

The problem with the Kishi is that it blocks all the ports, right? I can't use a wired headset at the same time as the Kishi...

At least the Android version has external USB-C port that could fit an adapter. The specs say only that you can charge through it, it would be nice to know if it's really limited to charging or fully functional.

It is not functional and is power only. Source: I returned mine after being incredibly annoyed by the whole experience because of audio lag. I tried the Razer low-latency earbuds but the latency is still annoyingly high.

Ok, that's unexpectedly dumb design.

I can only imagine the product manager telling HW designers that nobody cares about audio latency, everyone uses Bluetooth anyway and damn this thing must be cheaper and ready for production yesterday.

I'm pretty sure Apple has proper gamepad support for iOS. Remember Made for iPhone? It's needed with their Apple TV that pretty much runs iOS.

But controller support in games is still niche because most people just aren't going to do it. I believe Apple enforces it for their Apple Arcade games, because those have to run on Apple TV too, but outside of that there just isn't much interest.

Did it? The Nintendo Switch sold 114 million units since its release in 2017 [0]. The original Gameboy (a reasonable guess as the most popular handheld gaming device of all time) sold 118 million units [1] in 15 years.

[0] https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2022/11/the-nintendo-switc...

There are other devices, and other ways to measure the market size, but 114 million of anything is not a niche market.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1101888/unit-sales-game-...

Very different size. You could argue that switch/steamdeck-sized devices have replaced gameboy/ngage/psp-like devices. However, phones seem like the much closer competition -> none of Nintendo, sony or MS even tried to make this form factor anymore

The DS may be more representative of the peak of the market, and would sell in larger numbers in a single year- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_DS_sales

Phones are better at gaming. You can emulate pocket sized handheld gaming devices as well. Perhaps you are only talking about popular games like Candy Crush and the such but there are a lot of heavyweight titles released for mobile platforms as well.

I was more talking around the time of the 3ds and Vita release dates. That was about when smartphones started to take off and took out the handheld gaming market. You can see it in the sales, the 3ds did half the lifetime sales of the DS. And then there was the Vita.

The hardware is obviously better with how often people replace the phones, but ability to target same few interfaces and not have to test on few dozen of phones to make game run well overall leads to better games.

> but there are a lot of heavyweight titles released for mobile platforms as well.

...like ? Every single mobile game that I found "good" usually launched on other platforms too.

I have a feeling that social media and video streaming probably replaced casual on the go gaming. It's more addictive.

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