Why is the Age of the Handheld Game Machine End?

The late 1990s and early 2000s can be seen as the golden age of handheld gaming machines. Around the world, GameBoy has become a symbol of the gaming industry with more than 200 million units sold. In Vietnam, the Brick Game puzzle machine also has a stormy period and used to be a closeness of the early 8x and 9x gamers.

Until the late 2000s, handhelds still played an important role in the gaming industry thanks to products like the Sony PSP or the Nintendo DS. The successors of these systems, PS Vita and 3DS, continued to extend the era of handheld game consoles for a few more years, before the era of smartphones unfolded. PS Vita officially stopped production in 2019, while the 3DS followed suit in 2020. No successive version has been released that caused the era of handhelds to officially end. So what is the reason for this shutdown?

Phones and tablets take the throne

When the first iPhone came out in 2007, the App Store didn’t even launch. Up to the iPhone 12, the App Store had nearly 1 million games and more than 3.4 million apps. Google Play has a much larger number than that, but it also includes a lot of apps / games removed. That shows how great the appeal of iOS and Android is.

In the early days, mobile games were generally hard to compare with games exclusively on high-end handhelds. But over the last couple of years, phone specs have grown and have been seen with both free and paid games being as good as handheld games. That’s not to mention the handheld and console emulation on phones even better than what the handheld itself can do.

Handheld game consoles used to outstrip smartphones in terms of graphics and design

As a result, mobile games have attracted a huge number of players to participate in virtual worlds where millions of people are connected to each other at the same time. In the opposite direction, the handheld system, which is a pure offline game, shows a person gradually becoming out of place in a forest of smartphones, tablets, and multi-purpose phablets.

Million-dollar, even billion-dollar mobile games have quickly become a lucrative piece of cake attracting top developers. And as handhelds made developers no longer interested, gamers gradually turned their backs because there weren’t many new games to play while the machine was getting older and lacking in hardware improvements.

Virtual reality and the cloud in full bloom

Playing virtual reality games (VR gaming) and cloud computing games is just a rather vague thing when it appeared in the early 2010s. But as it progresses, as the technology develops, the industries think. as this auxiliary gradually entered the main stage.

Today, virtual reality is all about powerful applications in the gaming industry, from sports to action to shooting. Virtual reality has played a role that handheld did not do, and is evolving independently and moving in a separate direction from consoles. Will gamers pay money to buy a handheld to play console-like games with worse graphics?

Blockbuster games can be played on handheld devices thanks to cloud gaming

But the shot that ended the handheld came from cloud computing. The application of this technology to the gaming industry makes the experience of blockbuster games on mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets very simple. The role of handheld at this time became cumbersome, redundant, and only for the gamer who likes to collect.

Console is still central

Despite the variety of forms of entertainment, consoles are by far the number one entertainment machine for gamers. The 4-year-old Nintendo Switch has sold 80 million units globally and is still creating a fever thanks to Nintendo’s ‘home-grown’ games such as Animal Crossing, Mario, Pokemon or The Legend of Zelda …

Meanwhile, next-gen console systems such as PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X / S are continuously sold out in major markets such as the US, Japan … Competitive prices when manufacturers accept losses for each selling machines and a huge online game store and promising exclusive games in the future are the reasons for consoles to retain heat in this era.

Being so attentive to the console, the makers of course did not have enough time to take care of the handheld. And that is the reason why this system has been reluctantly killed in a world of technology that is constantly changing day by day.