Mobiles, iPod touch killing off Nintendo DS, Sony PSP - Page 2

Let's wait 5 years. By then we'll have enough data to talk about.

Some people don't want to pay for a smartphone data plan.
I know several people who use the iPod touch as a "smartphone" sans the phone.

There's also another demographic. My 6 & 8 year olds each have an iPod touch.
No DS or PSP. And no reason for a phone yet. Especially a current smartphone plan.

So far he is wrong about Win7 (changed the goal post on later articles) and on Kinect.

The jury is out on the CDMA iphone and the Win7 phone.

Usually right, but has yet to admit about Kinect.

I want the Win7 phone to be a success as much as Daniel does; we are both sick of the Android vs. iOS arguments.

Fair enough, but the article at hand is a mixture of statements of fact and reporting on other analysis. Surely Daniel's field of wrongness doesn't extend to rendering facts and other people's analysis nonsensical?

I mean, predicting the success or failure of new products is one thing; giving some context to what is indisputably happening in the handheld gaming market is another.

I did a Google search of RoughlyDrafted.com and couldn't find any mention of Kinect. I did see a half dozen references of Project Natal, the code name of Kinect. Nowhere did Daniel "predict" that this would be a "complete and utter flop based on his research." Are you intentionally lying, or does it come natural?

In one article, he describes MS' Xbox division as "a home entertainment business that has rarely made any money despite billions in investment. Its brightest star is an imitative effort to copy the interactive controller that Nintendo debuted for the Wii back in 2006. When you hear vaporware incantations of Project Natal, it means youve stumbled into a seance of the faithful trying to reanimate Microsofts relevance as the god of imitations."

So rather than calling Kinect a "flop," he called it Microsoft's' "brightest star," albeit an imitative effort to copy the Wii controller.

Also, a year ago, he said of pundits: "It also gets tedious to try to string along a pretense of excitement about such duds as Surface and the vaporware dreams of a year or two out: Project Natal, Windows 7 SP1, and Windows were getting serious now Mobile 7, while still maintaining a straight face."

Calling Natal "vaporware of a year or two out" was certainly accurate to do a year ago.

Shortly before that, he wrote "Microsoft is also well known for advertising bullshit it cant deliver. Bill Gates talked up OS/2, floated a vision of Cairo that never materialized, falsely proclaimed himself the Moses of tablet computing, and blew so much vaporware at competitors (Bob, ActiveMovie, DirectMovie, Surround Video, Chromeffects, WinFS, SPOT, Mira, PlaysForSure, Advanced Streaming Format, Soapbox, Longhorn, Surface, Natal, Courier) that it wouldnt exactly be a surprise if the company decided that the best way to compete with bad news was to generate some distracting good news that just never seemed to materialize after peoples attention spans moved on."

Project Natal was certainly "vaporware aimed at competitors," even it if eventually materialized in what must be a nearly profitless product more than a year later. The company has managed to sell it to a tiny fraction of the Xbox 360 installed base (2 million of about 45 million Xbox 360s).

But since Daniel never referred to Kinect as being a "complete and utter flop," you should certainly stop repeating the lie that he once did.

Vaporware: Def per m-w ": a computer-related product that has been widely advertised but has not and may never become available"

In other words, Daniel said it would never come out. That's like saying it would flop before it was ever sold.

You need to read more articles. I was convinced as well because as he reasoned, the table computer was vaporware (you can find it at like the microsoft store but come on, I agree on that), courier is vaporware (obviously correct), and that the Natal was just more Microsoft tech that would never work or see the light of day.

In this case, he was wrong.

I don't t think the "research" takes into account the demographics that each device targets. Did anyone consider that the reason the DS has slowed has more to do with the market being saturated AND the DS 3D coming out next year? In regards to Sony, while the iOS devices are neat and can do many things, they don't do gaming as well as a Sony (or Nintendo) device. Sony should have already gotten their PSP2 out, but (as Sony often does) they are milking the market for as much as they can. Just because their is a correlation doesn't mean their is a causation.

If IPHONE & mobiles are killing off Nintendo & Sony PSP. then what's going to happen when Apple goes full blast with their Gamimg center??

Gee, you actually bolded the whole "may" part, then immediately render that as "never"?

It's in the nature of vaporware that the the manufacturer might throw a change up and actually release a product at some point. Given that, the term can never be applied with complete authority, since technically there's always the possibility that something will emerge at some point.

With its track record of flashy tech demos that never see the light of day and the prolonged gestation period of Natal I don't think it's entirely outrageous to have referred to it as vapor. It subsequently has proven to be the real deal, but then so could Courier.

This is where I think the Playstation phone fits in. Provides the advantages of physical buttons for games that benefit from them, but doesn't require you to carry two separate devices.

That's because to Daniel, vaporware means "never" see the light of retail day. It's his writing style - he, in a mild satire/negative/cynical sorta way, trashes others. Wait, I know the term now, polarizing, as if btw apple and the rest of the world is all black and white, when it rarely is.

Fact: "Jon Carmack" spells his first name "John" not "Jon"

Hey Dick...can I be a grand kid? I promise I do not act a day over 12.

The Japanese market has had mobile gaming for quite a while. Also their phones do pretty much everything. However the DS and the Advance before it have had strong sales. Part of the reasons are that a dedicated game pad layout is necessary for certain game types.

In fact I tried playing tetris on an iPhone, didn't work out so well. Myst on the other hand and that gyroscope racing game do manage to shine on an iPhone.

But the 3DS will sell, I think the current numbers are due to market saturation and the economy. I don't think given that buttons + screen it would be too small... the iPhone being anything but a phone that happens to have games.

The iPad however I can see being gamer friendly, but also possibly a little-bit overkill for long term gaming.

People seem to think that everyone will do everything with one cellphone, I still have an iPod for music, and a DS and a PSP. You really think if I'm going on a long trip I'm gonna spend 8 hrs using a phone instead of a PSP to watch movies?

The iPad/iPhone are in a different market than the DS and PSP.

Now what sony really needs to do is allow easy syncing between the PSP and PS3, its very convient to play a PS1 title (You can get them on PSN) on the PS3 and copy it to the PSP and play it on the go, and then copy back to PS3.

Well the section where Daniel is trying to allude that Apple was behind Sega dropping the hardware business is trash, especially since Sega made the announcement six years before the iPhone/iPod Touch came out.

No, they are a different price, especially since you can change the storage on an iPod touch.

PSP (expandable storage) - NZ$300
iPod Touch 64GB (non expandable storage) - NZ$663
iPod Touch 32GB (non expandable storage) - NZ$500
iPod Touch 8GB (non expandable storage) - NZ$387

Ok, as if that actually changes things.

I didn't get that he was saying that.

He said


He says they began creating games for existing platfores, including some of the first games for Apple's iOS.

It wasn't including iOS, there were no iOS devices around when Sega "gave up" on the hardware

So? I remember that very well. Sega's platform failed, and they began doing games for others. A major platform for them today is iOS. So what did he say that was wrong? You are the one saying that he said something he didn't say. He never said or alluded to the idea that Apple was somehow behind Sega's demise as a platform, or anything like that. You said that. What he did say is correct.

So maybe, he should have added one more word to make you happy, that word would be "later". I think we all know what he means.

He did allude that, you are just ignoring that. If that is what you want to do fine, I don't really care.

And iOS isn't a major platform for Sega, it is one of the platforms for Sega. And he didn't say anything about the size the iOS market for Sega in the article, so I think it may be you that is claiming he said stuff he didn't.


No, I can only interupt what he wrote, I don't, and can't assume he meant something else, if he did, he would have written that.

You sound like a Microsoft fanboy. Are you sure you're not a troll? By the way, are you still a virgin?

Why would anyone in his right mind want BGM(Bill Gates' Monster) to be successful?

I don't want my young son to have a phone, but he sure loves his iPod touch. The youth market for the iPod touches is huge as many parents don't want their kids to have full fledged smart phones.

My nephew (12 years old) has owned 3 DS's and got a PSP last year for Christmas. This year he's dying to have an iPod Touch because he loves me and my wife's iPhones. What's funny is that these DS's and PSP are so underpowered compared to the newest generations of iDevices even though they're much larger, bulkier. They also look like childs toys.

I have been expecting this for a while now. It would be a shame to see a giant like nintendo fall but the last year or two has seen them rely entirely on riding a wave of old school gamer nostalgia, with most of the innovation originating from a single man: shigeru miyamoto.

The virtual console is a great concept it's just poorly executed with a horrible user interface. I'll trudge through it to get to the gold but I don't know that your average gamer will.

Yeah, it's weird how devices 5 and 6 years old are outdated compared to modern technology, huh?

As for "bulkier"--that's not really a negative considering, the DS at least, is several times more durable than an iPhone. It's designed with the expectation of it being dropped.

Wow, calling someone a fanboy and a virgin at 5am in the morning...you need to look in the mirror and you will find your troll staring right back at you.

Just as Steve Jobs has extreme distaste for any IBM type and ask whether he is virgin, I also have extreme distaste for any Microsoft type. I despise Bill Gates and the fact he betrayed Apple. Just like how Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Larry Page betrayed Jobs' mentorship by giving him Android in return. So any of you Microsoft fanboys should run as fast as you could before I catch you.

Ok Artie MacStrawman.

Maybe that's part of the problem, though-- the refresh rate of moblie gaming hardware is glacial compared to that of cell phones.

Even if the next Nintendo or PSP jump ahead, are they going to be updated once or twice a year? Or will it just a brief respite followed by inevitable eclipse?

These devices had never had to compete in a world full of extremely capable smartphones or tablets which advance at a rapid pace. The old console milk it for all its worth strategy can't work anymore. Can Nintendo or Sony keep up?

They have updated it, just not so much the hardware. I can't look it up right now to see the major differences, but as with all consoles, it has to do with making sure all games work well and flawlessly, and in this regard, comparatively speaking, the iOS platform is severely fragmented.

Yeah, that must be why it's so hard to sell an app into that fragmented iOS market. Better to update your hardware every five years to ensure continuity.

Look, that worked when there wasn't any competition (or rather all of the competition was doing the same thing). But it doesn't work anymore. Anyone trying to cling to that model is screwed, if they aren't screwed already.

Different resolutions, different CPUs with different ARM versions, different GPUs included and different CPU clock speeds don't make for a consistent gaming experience.

Why would I want to upgrade an ipod touch from the original to the 3GS equiv to the newest version each year just to play updated games? That's retarded.

Well, to each his own. I find playing with a touchscreen and moving via a gyro to be most imprecise, but that's just me.

On another note, I also don't remember Pocket PCs, Palm devices and the like killing the gaming market that was back then either. Then again, they didn't sell as well as apple stuff does.

He didn't allude to it at all. He just stated the facts, which are correct. And you DO care, or you wouldn't have bothered to post several posts on this to me.


It's large enough.


Yes, that's it. It's your interpretation.

Ok, enough now!

Not quite the same thing. With consoles and mobile gaming devices, the software is very expensive. My daughter has bought games that cost $79! Nuts! And you rarely get updates. So to have a new console every 5, or now maybe at least 6 years, is understandable. And mobile versions come out every 2 years or so. Given that those handhelds are not updatable, fragmentation is much worse there. iOS games are very cheap, and when Apple updates the hardware and OS once a year, we get FREE updates, and even free upgrades to the games. Since we don't have dozens of models floating around every year as we see with Android phones, fragmentation is very little, and not a real problem.

I read this sight pretty religiously as I believe that Apple makes some pretty cool products even if their marketing tends towards hyperbole (iPad is magical?... like unicorns magical?)...

What's really striking is how nasty the comment tone gets on articles written by Daniel Erin Dilger. There is a lot of name-calling of MS-fanboys vs Apple fanboys. I've paid a lot of attention and it seems to happen worse in articles penned by Mr. Dilger compared to other authors.

My personal opinion why is because Mr. Dilger's articles are so Apple-slanted that they hardly seem credible. Consider this thread about mobile phones eating into dedicated gaming systems like the DS and PSP. Of course, they are... It's very obvious, but Mr. Dilger would have you believe this is solely due to Apple and iOS devices. If you read the actual report and others that predated this, the industry analysts have been predicting for years that mobile devices and gaming devices would converge. Apple is certainly driving some of this as is Android as will Windows Phone 7. But based on the article information it would seem that Apple is at the absolute center of the universe.

Sadly, Mr. Dilger reads like a shill for Apple and not a journalist trying to report facts. There are, however, other writers on this site including Josh Ong who do seem to strive to present facts vs. fanboy opinion. Hopefully, Apple Insider will choose to use more credible authors for their articles in the future.

The reason why this is said about Apple, and it's said in many places, mainly, is because it's leading that charge. You need to see the sales of apps and games on iOS vs that on other platforms such as Android. Well over a billion on iOS and just tens of millions on Android. Perhaps Android will catch at some point. But as of now, they're trailing drastically. There's no one else in sight.

This article, and it's hard to find anything relevant in this area, gives some idea of what we're talking about. Games sales and other apps sales seem to track closely.

http://blog.jwegener.com/2010/05/12/...nload-compare/

Here's one from Larva labs, mentioned in the last article.

http://larvalabs.com/blog/android/an...app-stores-1b/

This is an interesting take.

http://www.fonehome.co.uk/2010/10/26...ndroid-gaming/

It does if your name is John Carmack

I believe it is also their advantage, it is nice that you can buy a PSP3000 today and still play the games from release date, and an original PSP will still play the new release games.