It had a unique dual-screen design-hence the acronymic name-with one typical monitor and one touchscreen with a stylus. As smartphones began to become a viable gaming platform in the late 2000s and early 2010s, it became less attractive to consumers to carry a second gadget with them just for the purpose of entertainment.Įven so, the Nintendo DS was still a massive hit in the 2000s. What eventually began to chip away at Nintendo’s dominance wasn’t any one particular mistake by the company, but instead, was just the march of technology. The rise, further rise, sudden fall, and slow climb back up For a lot of its customers, Nintendo simply is handheld gaming… or rather, it was at one point. The PSP would eventually be retired in 2014 after a successful run, selling 80 million units across its life cycle its successor, the 2012 PlayStation Vita, attracted a small fervent fanbase, but couldn’t compete with the then-mature mobile gaming market and sold a fraction of what the PSP had.Įven when Nintendo seemed like it was totally adrift with its home consoles-for example, see the GameCube’s slow release schedule, or the consistent sales failure of all major third-party titles on the Wii-it always had its handhelds to keep the lights on. Gadget fiends also liked the PSP for the ease with which it could be hacked, which let players install custom firmware and use PSPs as portable, high-storage emulation or media platforms. Sony seemed to want to use the PSP to open a new front in film distribution, and offered an entire line of movies on Universal Media Disc (UMD) for play on the system. It premiered in 2004, and while its initial MSRP of $249.99 proved to be a stumbling block, it was immediately attractive to a tech-enthusiast crowd. The strongest competitor Nintendo ever had was Sony’s PlayStation Portable, a flexible device that could play its own trademark optical discs. It’s since developed a fanbase in the retro-gaming community, and is a prized find among collectors. Its successor, the 16-bit Nomad, was doomed at debut by the infamously poor decision-making that was a Sega hallmark in the ’90s, as well as the North American debut of Pokemon Red and Blue on the Game Boy. The Game Gear’s short battery life and limited software library proved to be sticking points, but it was still a modest success. Sega managed to pose a challenge to Nintendo in the 1990s with the Game Gear, a more powerful system that offered a full-color backlit screen, which homed in on one of the original Game Boy’s most notorious weak spots. A few companies have tried to break into that end of the market over the years, but most of those competing systems, such as the Wonderswan or Neo Geo Pocket Color, are now historical footnotes. Starting in 1989, with the release of the original “gray brick” Game Boy, Nintendo had a nearly unbreakable hammerlock on the handheld gaming space. Several of Nintendo’s biggest franchises, such as Pokemon and Fire Emblem, either began on the portables or made a name for themselves there. Nintendo’s portable systems have been a cornerstone of the games industry for just over 30 years of the top 10 best-selling consoles of all time, as of 2020, 2 of the top 3 are Nintendo portables. It’s a strange end to a strange ride for the 3DS, the latest and possibly last of Nintendo’s dedicated handheld gaming devices.
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