id Software co-founder and technical director John Carmack has told Dallas News that he thinks Sony NGP and 3DS could be the last dedicated gaming handhelds.
"You don't always get to build pyramids just because you want to," he said, noting that smartphones now pack many of the features once solely available on dedicated devices like PSP and DS, even if they lack the specialised control inputs of more traditional gaming handhelds.
"The smart phone may turn out to be 80 percent as good at gaming as a dedicated gaming platform," Carmack suggested.
"If that's what the consumers are going to trend towards on there, there may not be much as developers we can do about that," he added.
Speaking last November about the then recent release of Rage for iPhone, Carmack said he was a major fan of the App Store platform, and that id Software's more likely to develop games for Apple products in the future than for DS or PSP.
Comments
22 comments so far...
spunwicked on 9 Feb '11 said:
Just no.
MPH on 9 Feb '11 said:
Carmack has grown a goatee in the shape of some fingers. He can literally do anything. This guy is a GOD.
altitude2k on 9 Feb '11 said:
Could be. Consider how close in spec all these new phones coming out are with the NGP and the 3DS, compared with when the 3DS and PSP were launched. I suspect they'll easily catch up within a standard release cycle period.
Barca Azul on 9 Feb '11 said:
Not unless all smartphones come with a dedicated controller device in the future.
Its like touchscreen phone, some love them, others hate them. For personal use touchscreen is great, but for business use they are crap.
Athrun888 on 9 Feb '11 said:
I disagree, if handheld gaming is going to die then the 3ds will flop, and it just simply won't, handheld gaming devices are still the best way to experience proper games on the go.
So what this guy seems to think is that the market will just completely die, no, it won't, it might not be the sole thing people use anymore, but to suggest it'll die out is just silly, analysts predicted the death of books with the invention of the E-book, the death of CDs with the advent of I-tunes and mp3, the death of tv thanks to the internet, and a great many other things, none of them died, they may not be the dominant format in their respective industries anymore but they are far from dead, the same thing will happen with handheld gaming.
TimHotston on 9 Feb '11 said:
He’s probably right, he predicted that small game development teams would expand and become more popular and they have, look at all those indie developers out there now! He said that in an interview with the PC Gamer in like 2004... And wasn't everyone surprised that Sony are releasing a PSP2 and a PSPhone as separate consoles? When nearly everyone wanted the two consoles features combined together.....
runadumb on 9 Feb '11 said:
No s**t sherlock. They may lack the controls but we are only a peripheral away from curing that. Considering dedicated devices have a life cycle of at least 5 years and phones improve leaps and bounds every 12 months they will be lucky if they sell enough dedicated handhelds in 2014-2015 to break even.
I hope Sony iterates the Xperia Play every year until it turns into the NGP. I doubt that is their game plan though. Unfortunately they will probably keep it last years hardware each time so as not to eat into the NGP sales very much.
fps_d0minat0r on 9 Feb '11 said:
assuming nintendo and sony sit idle, yes.
they could just add phone support and it would kill all the mobile phones on the market. and it wouldnt cost much as we know from looking at the £5-£10 handsets available on the market. i dont know why thier not doing that now. iphone sales would plummet if 3ds and NGP built in phone support.
they already have most the components, all they need to add is a sim card slot and a microphone.
for sony it would be like shooting themselves in the foot because they sell a lot of phones but nintendo should do it since it wouldnt have an impact on them and it would give the 3ds an advantage over NGP.
runadumb on 9 Feb '11 said:
I can only assume you have never used a smartphone. The "Phone" part of it is almost the least important. It's the, to steal Sony's PR "they only do everything" part. The ecosystems involved for web browsing, media playback, apps and games etc are immense.
Just look at Microsoft, who have re-entered the smartphone market with Windows Phone 7 after falling asleep at the wheel. It is a great looking platform but is missing what many consider basic features like copy and paste and 3 party app multitasking. Apple launched without these features but came out with a game changing device but it still took them 3 years to get up to speed with other devices that were on the market in that front.
So if Microsoft struggle with all the effort they are putting in how hard will it be to enter the market in another 2 years? WebOs (we will see tonight) could finally get a foothold, IOS, Android and WP7 will continue to evolve and add features making developing a competing ecosystem extremely extremely difficult and hugely costly. Sticking the ability to make phone calls on a 3DS does nothing to solve the problem.
Xperia play is a baby step in the right direction, especially as it uses an established OS.
AJDarkstar on 9 Feb '11 said:
Nintendo will always make handhelds, until the end of all time. Not just the end of the human race, but ALL TIME!
milky_joe on 9 Feb '11 said:
I'm not really seeing dedicated handhelds being killed off unless smartphones become cheaper. £30 per month (plus a possible one off fee for the phone) over a long contract works out at a lot more than the one off cost of a handheld console after all.
lordirongut on 9 Feb '11 said:
I think that there's a decent chance that he's right, but that doesn't make the idea sit well with me. I won't repeat what others have put about dedicated control methods, but I am a big proponent of that argument. A real pad will always be better than a virtual one, and the QWERTY keyboards on phones are just too small to be comfortable.
My main sticking point, and I could see it being a sticking point for many of us including even developers, is the stability offered by dedicated handhelds. The PSP has been around six years, and the DS is the same. We haven't really had to upgrade for all that time - sure, they've released new models, but they've not released anything radically different. You don't get 'PSP-3000 Only' games, and there are very few DSi only games. What this has allowed for us is essentially a guarantee that our investments won't be made redundant, and it has allowed developers time to make good, meaty games and get to know the platforms. With mobile gaming, to play new releases we'd be forced to upgrade considerably more often, and let's not forget that smartphones are much more expensive anyway. You'd have to upgrade, theoretically, three times during the PSP's lifespan to keep up with new releases, assuming that you're on an 18-24 month contract). Add to that, developers can't center around and get to know a specific platform, and we could kiss long games pretty much goodbye since if you're developing for a platform which will be two years old by the time the game is released, it just won't sell.
To summarise, without stability, the future is A: Expensive and B: Full of games with no depth. It makes me seriously doubt Orange when they say 'The Future's Bright'.
richard99 on 9 Feb '11 said:
The lack of real controls on smartphones is the obvious flaw in the argument but there's also the fact smartphone specs are constantly changing and that there's so many different brands and still a fair few different OS's they could be running so it'd be hard for all but the most successful devs to reach everyone.
Toninho deZoete on 9 Feb '11 said:
So mobile phone gaming is what Wii is to console gaming? Taking in mind that the Wii is home to some of the most innovative and best games of this generation, I don't see the case is as how you state it to be. I don 't see mobile gaming as the equivalent of Nintendo's Wii.
By the way, there many great, fun and addictive games on mobile phones. On Iphone for example there are indeed games that could hold a candle to decent consolegames. Have you ever given mobile phone games an honest chance? Or Wii games, for that matter? You should at least try Angry Birds. Other games that can hold up a candle to decent console games are Zen Bound, Rage, Infinity Blade, Cut The Rope, Dead Space, Osmos, NOVA, Real Racing. I'm not saying I prefer those games. But they are of pretty decent quality nonetheless, and can take up a big chunk of your gaming time, just because they are good fun.
The way I see it. Games are games. No matter how you put it. Some are more challenging, some less. Some take longer to complete. Some games make a life lasting impression, others don't. Some have completely different experiences to offer. The only thing that matters is: Where you entertained while playing?
I'm with you on the whole dedicated handheld replacing thing. But I also think people should be less judgmental about things they don't spend time to understand and form an honest opinion. And I'm not saying you are, jim2wheels. I simply don't know. But you get me ranting nonetheless.
Peace
UltraVioletZero on 9 Feb '11 said:
This is nonsense. For example, I have a phone and I have an iPod Touch. The reason I don't get an iPhone is that I don't want to use up the battery life of my phone by playing games/watching videos.
I like small phones that can fit nicely in my pocket (since I use my phone quite frequently), while I like to do my handheld gaming on something with a bigger screen and proper inputs for control.
The problem with Carmack is that he never sees past the technological end of things. Yes, maybe phones will be so incredibly powerful in the future that they can display NGP like graphics or better, but I'll still want my phone to be a small device that fits in my pocket and that I can call and text people on. I'll still want my handheld gaming device to be something with a nice screen and good controls that I leave in my bag till I want to use it.
richard99 on 9 Feb '11 said:
I actually think app gaming and most of the Wii's library have a lot in common since they are both simple, less complex but with some brilliant exceptions.
I've enjoyed a few games from apple's app store (Canabalt, Doodle Jump, Cut the Rope) but a lot of them (Rage, Dead Space, NOVA, Real Racing, GTA: Chinatown Wars to name a few) would have worked a lot better with real controls than with just a g-sensor and touchscreen. That's why I can't see smartphones replacing handhelds any time soon.
Toninho deZoete on 9 Feb '11 said:
True. And that's why I don't prefer mobile phone games.
jamez-vampire on 9 Feb '11 said:
riiiiiight cause mobile phones have such great games and my god are just awsome
so legend of zelda, uncharted, metal gear solid, GTA and Dragon quest to name a few
will be put on mobile and gaming will be on a thing thats battery power dies every hour
I think not my good man..... lol
kimoak on 9 Feb '11 said:
If a game is rated 80% and another at 100%, I know which game I would choose.
Dragovian on 9 Feb '11 said:
Let's hope he's wrong.
It's not as though smartphones are unpopular now... How many of their owners care about proper games? For as long as there are awesome pieces of software like Zelda, I think there will be a dedicated audience willing to buy the hardware for it.
shogunreaper on 10 Feb '11 said:
I doubt it, seeing how there are plenty of idiots who buy new phones every year *cough* apple fanboys *cough*
It might be a long time before we see anymore handhelds after the 3ds\psp2, because they are both powerhouses.
I would say that the next handhelds we see (aside from revisions to psp2ds like 3ds lite or psp2 5000) would probably be in 2015+
Cogglesz on 10 Feb '11 said:
No chance, handhelds have been around for many years now and something like an iphone is not going to take that away, there are only a few games i know about that are actually anything near handheld console gaming, not everyone wants a casual 2 minute game of angry birds or whatever, MGS peace walker was a great gaming experience for me and with there being so many gaming franchises and characters ninty and sony have many years left to bring out handheld consoles, sure they don't have to be just gaming handhelds, we've learned this from the psp but the fact is nothing is going to stop handheld gaming unless sony and nintendo decide to stop making them, and no i doubt they'd make a 3ds or whatever that can do phonecalls, it would raise the price too much to be effective.
The "Smartphones" & handhelds are two completely different pieces of electrical gear, i do not want to be playing pokemon light brown (or whatever it may be in ten years time) and then getting a phone call when i'm about to win. When you start an epic adventure on a handheld and you are loving the game you get very drawn in by it and this is something that smartphones can't and wont do, i see them more like a utility to a busy outgoing life but with handhelds its like escapism in your palms, i'm just offended by the fact a developer would not think about these things and consider them, i don't get how smartphones will be the future of handheld gaming, thats just complete bulls**t in my opinion, there is a reason why sony has a psp phone and the NGP, NGP will already be expensive without having a built in phone, if it did have a phone then it would be too expensive for the usual handheld gamer and in times like these where money is important they would just flop instantly.
Handheld gaming consoles are in my opinion only related to there home console counterparts with them communicating with each other and what not, not these silly smartphones that already cost about £400 without any breath taking graphics and once the smartphones catch up with the likes of NGP, sony or nintendo will already have a new handheld out twice as nice as before and will once again reset the standard of handheld gaming.