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Both Nintendo/Sony sold ~3x more than Microsoft last month Steam Deck numbers are nothing compared to what these 3 are selling, if i remember correctly, it was

Both Nintendo/Sony sold ~3x more than Microsoft last month Steam Deck numbers are nothing compared to what these 3 are selling, if i remember correctly, it was 1 million reservations total for a whole year, that sounds like a flop to my book when you compare with the 3 existing players I think next gen we'll see Sony getting back into the handheld market, Nintendo coming up with a second version, and Microsoft coming up with a cloud stick Microsoft doubling down on cloud gaming might kill their Xbox brand, it's too early for that, they'll miss the handheld market just like they missed the smartphone era https://www.vgchartz.com/ https://www.vgchartz.com/

cubefox 4y ago
Sony building a Switch competitor for the next generation, in addition to a PlayStation 6? That sounds very unlikely to me. With the Switch form factor, it would have to be a lot closer to the PlayStation 6 than the small PSP was to the PlayStation 3. I don't think Sony wants to have two similar consoles on the market; they would compete with themselves. And the memories of the PSVita misfortune will deter them further. No, I think they just do an ordinary PS6 and nothing else. They could, theoretically, make the PS6 itself a hybrid like the Switch, but that would be a really bad strategy, since they'd give up their stationary dominance to Microsoft just to compete with a market where Nintendo is dominant.
- Kukumber 4y ago
  Sony will have to prepare for the cloud gaming revolution once network infrastructure will match the grid network infrastructure A handheld will be the catalyzer for cloud gaming market, just like what smartphones did to landline telephones I can see a PS6 with a handheld as companion, it perfectly make sense, if they don't then that'd be a missed opportunity It definitely is better than Xbox X/S, Microsoft missed a huge opportunity there, they have to manufacture 2 different SKU (sony will soon have just one with their modular design) I can't be the only one to sense this signal? If they don't do a handheld then that could only mean they got pressured to not do it, by whom? shareholders? insiders? 3rd-party? The PSVita story is unfortunate, but lot of solid reasons why it didn't do as good as they'd have hoped, it sold ~ same as the WiiU and yet Nintendo doubled down and were successful with the Switch, it could have been PSVita2 or PSP2 and Sony would have found similar success, even thought Switch took some time before going mainstream, that's another evidence that the market is demanding it, you can see it with the boom of the handheld retro consoles that all are running android/linux Successful games like CoD Mobile and Genshin Impact, as well as the countless of games getting ported to the Switch and Smartphones is a better evidence than my comment, smartphone users are demanding premium games, and that played a big role in the Switch success
- eldaisfish 4y ago
  The PS Vita was ahead of its time. I own a secondhand OELD model and the hardware is AMAZING, considering it is a decade old. The home brew community added lots of value with the emulation ability and the fact that sony abandoned the console. Yes, the vita was a flop at the time but i am convinced that if sony released a modern equivalents, it would sell like hotcakes. Where i am less certain is of what this means for sony’s strategy - and there i agree with you. Two consoles with two different graphical capabilities could be a disaster. Or it could not? I don’t know.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    They even released the Playstation TV, which was a tiny little box (smaller than most portable hard drives) with the Vita internals and an HDMI port. Plays most Vita games, you just use PS4 controllers with it (and maybe also PS3? Can't recall for sure). Really, take a Vita and add a cradle for TV, and you've basically got a Switch. And the Vita was developed and sold in parallel to a full Playstation console, so it's not unprecedented. Normal, even, except for Microsoft, until very recently when having a separate handheld system seemed to die a sudden death, I assume due to the rise of phone gaming—Nintendo, Gameboy series; Sega, Gamegear et c.; Sony, PSP/Vita.
    - cubefox 4y ago
      The rise of phone gaming was probably the reason why 3DS and Vita sold so much worse than DS and PSP. There is no big market for small handheld consoles anymore. The Switch sold well, but probably just because it is a bigger system which is more similar to a stationary console than to a phone. Which makes it unlikely that a company would release both a mobile and a stationary system again.
    - darkteflon 4y ago
      And so they did. I’d never heard of PSTV but that’s really cool. You can buy them brand new here on Amazon Japan, currently going for JPY50,000.
fnands 4y ago
Flop is a strong word. I think they sold 1M in ~6 months, with a lot of supply side constraint. That being said, I they're nowhere near the tens of millions of Switches sold last year. But I don't think Valve was trying to. They've done very little advertising, you can only buy it through the Steam store, and (I own one by the way) it feels a bit like it's still aimed mainly at the enthusiast crowd right now. Then again, it was the top selling item in the Steam store for most weeks since launch. My take is that Valve is using the early adopter crowd to help iron out the kinks (of which there were many at launch) and will then push harder later. Whether later means later in this console's lifetime, or in a few years with a new iteration I'm not sure.
- agloe_dreams 4y ago
  I'm convinced that value has a few directions they want to go down: 1. They are still very excited by VR, additionally, there is no real breakout int he VR gaming space. Yes the Quest 2 is massively popular but Meta is doing their best to run from games on it. Valve is all about games and HL:Alyx is obviously the best VR game ever made. The next Value hardware will be a standalone VR headset. I would guess it has a seperate console portion that hooks onto a waist belt. 2. I wouldn't be surprised to see them do a laptop. The software is ready. Building an affordable SteamOS gaming laptop of their own design would be a successful product. (e.g. under $500) 3. The Steam Deck will absolutely get a successor of sorts. Likely a more mass-market take. That will tie in with Brick and Mortar launch plans. 4. Bonus points: SteamOS is designed around AMD hardware. AMD makes the hardware in the PS5 and XSX. It is not a stretch to consider Valve just diving deep into a $499 non-portable console/PC hybrid with custom silicon by AMD. Hell, even Tesla did it.
NineStarPoint 4y ago
Microsoft is definitely pivoting towards making most of their money from their subscription game pass, with the idea that even if their consoles do sub-par they can also gain money from PC users and try and eat into Steam’s market share. Given how many game studios they’ve been buying, I don’t know whether it’s smart to bet against them (even considering their spotty history with studio acquisition). While I have a hard time imagining Sony making another play at the handheld market after two failures, maybe they’ll realize that if they actually market it well and don’t use weird non-standard hardware like the PSP’s did they’d stand a better chance.
- ekianjo 4y ago
  I don't think it's fair to categorize the first PSP as a failure. It did very well market-wise, even though it did not sell as much as the DS.
  - NineStarPoint 4y ago
    You’re right, actually even the PS Vita sold more than 10 million which is better than I expected (It was a WiiU, not a Sega CD/Virtual Boy) . I’ll have to remember that in the future.
- agloe_dreams 4y ago
  > Microsoft is definitely pivoting towards making most of their money from their subscription game pass I'm not convinced this is going to be a winning strategy. It clearly doesn't work for TV/Movies. I'm not kidding. The model of "grow as fast a possible" means low prices and lots of content. Once the bean counters show up, the prices go up and content development becomes a trickle. Look at Netflix. By that point, it is way easier to launch a product with preorders to pay off investment. Microsoft's key play will be that they own the console and can force game pass/etc but seemingly, gamers prefer the other platforms so they may run. If Valve builds a living room next-gen console from Steam OS, they may have the most well-liked platform for devs.
- philistine 4y ago
  Look at the Xbox Series S. Microsoft has already fragmented the target hardware for consoles. Sony or Microsoft could conceivably make something akin to a portable Series S in four to five years. The delta between the TV console and the portable one would be greater however.
kibwen 4y ago
> that sounds like a flop to my book It would be a flop for a traditional console, but the Steam Deck isn't a console, it's a PC. The reason that consoles need massive sales is because consoles have a limited repertoire of games (at best, they might be backwards-compatible with the previous-generation console), so they need large sales to demonstrate an install base and convince developers to make games for the platform. But if you're compatible with PC software, you don't care about that. Valve doesn't need to entice anyone to make PC games; the install base for the Steam Deck is the entire PC market. And with the help of emulators, a PC has access to multiple orders of magnitude more games than any existing console. So the metric for success for the Steam Deck isn't to compare it to a console, rather it's to compare it to other specific PC form factors (e.g. a specific model of laptop).
- Kukumber 4y ago
  > It would be a flop for a traditional console, but the Steam Deck isn't a console, it's a PC I don't think people use it as a PC, but more like as a portable media center, the Switch and the PSP do that as well (even the PSP had a web browser!) So it's wrong to picture the Deck as the exception, even thought it can and is a supported use case They sell it and market its gaming capabilities https://store.steampowered.com/steamdeck https://store.steampowered.com/steamdeck You see games, not office apps, emails or social media apps, you don't have front facing camera so you can't use it for your meetings
  - ghodith 4y ago
    You've misunderstood the point. It's not that people use it like a PC that matters, it's that it's compatible with PC games.

cubefox 4y ago

Sony building a Switch competitor for the next generation, in addition to a PlayStation 6? That sounds very unlikely to me. With the Switch form factor, it would have to be a lot closer to the PlayStation 6 than the small PSP was to the PlayStation 3. I don't think Sony wants to have two similar consoles on the market; they would compete with themselves. And the memories of the PSVita misfortune will deter them further. No, I think they just do an ordinary PS6 and nothing else. They could, theoretically, make the PS6 itself a hybrid like the Switch, but that would be a really bad strategy, since they'd give up their stationary dominance to Microsoft just to compete with a market where Nintendo is dominant.

Kukumber 4y ago
Sony will have to prepare for the cloud gaming revolution once network infrastructure will match the grid network infrastructure A handheld will be the catalyzer for cloud gaming market, just like what smartphones did to landline telephones I can see a PS6 with a handheld as companion, it perfectly make sense, if they don't then that'd be a missed opportunity It definitely is better than Xbox X/S, Microsoft missed a huge opportunity there, they have to manufacture 2 different SKU (sony will soon have just one with their modular design) I can't be the only one to sense this signal? If they don't do a handheld then that could only mean they got pressured to not do it, by whom? shareholders? insiders? 3rd-party? The PSVita story is unfortunate, but lot of solid reasons why it didn't do as good as they'd have hoped, it sold ~ same as the WiiU and yet Nintendo doubled down and were successful with the Switch, it could have been PSVita2 or PSP2 and Sony would have found similar success, even thought Switch took some time before going mainstream, that's another evidence that the market is demanding it, you can see it with the boom of the handheld retro consoles that all are running android/linux Successful games like CoD Mobile and Genshin Impact, as well as the countless of games getting ported to the Switch and Smartphones is a better evidence than my comment, smartphone users are demanding premium games, and that played a big role in the Switch success
eldaisfish 4y ago
The PS Vita was ahead of its time. I own a secondhand OELD model and the hardware is AMAZING, considering it is a decade old. The home brew community added lots of value with the emulation ability and the fact that sony abandoned the console. Yes, the vita was a flop at the time but i am convinced that if sony released a modern equivalents, it would sell like hotcakes. Where i am less certain is of what this means for sony’s strategy - and there i agree with you. Two consoles with two different graphical capabilities could be a disaster. Or it could not? I don’t know.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  They even released the Playstation TV, which was a tiny little box (smaller than most portable hard drives) with the Vita internals and an HDMI port. Plays most Vita games, you just use PS4 controllers with it (and maybe also PS3? Can't recall for sure). Really, take a Vita and add a cradle for TV, and you've basically got a Switch. And the Vita was developed and sold in parallel to a full Playstation console, so it's not unprecedented. Normal, even, except for Microsoft, until very recently when having a separate handheld system seemed to die a sudden death, I assume due to the rise of phone gaming—Nintendo, Gameboy series; Sega, Gamegear et c.; Sony, PSP/Vita.
  - cubefox 4y ago
    The rise of phone gaming was probably the reason why 3DS and Vita sold so much worse than DS and PSP. There is no big market for small handheld consoles anymore. The Switch sold well, but probably just because it is a bigger system which is more similar to a stationary console than to a phone. Which makes it unlikely that a company would release both a mobile and a stationary system again.
  - darkteflon 4y ago
    And so they did. I’d never heard of PSTV but that’s really cool. You can buy them brand new here on Amazon Japan, currently going for JPY50,000.

fnands 4y ago

Flop is a strong word. I think they sold 1M in ~6 months, with a lot of supply side constraint. That being said, I they're nowhere near the tens of millions of Switches sold last year. But I don't think Valve was trying to. They've done very little advertising, you can only buy it through the Steam store, and (I own one by the way) it feels a bit like it's still aimed mainly at the enthusiast crowd right now. Then again, it was the top selling item in the Steam store for most weeks since launch. My take is that Valve is using the early adopter crowd to help iron out the kinks (of which there were many at launch) and will then push harder later. Whether later means later in this console's lifetime, or in a few years with a new iteration I'm not sure.

agloe_dreams 4y ago
I'm convinced that value has a few directions they want to go down: 1. They are still very excited by VR, additionally, there is no real breakout int he VR gaming space. Yes the Quest 2 is massively popular but Meta is doing their best to run from games on it. Valve is all about games and HL:Alyx is obviously the best VR game ever made. The next Value hardware will be a standalone VR headset. I would guess it has a seperate console portion that hooks onto a waist belt. 2. I wouldn't be surprised to see them do a laptop. The software is ready. Building an affordable SteamOS gaming laptop of their own design would be a successful product. (e.g. under $500) 3. The Steam Deck will absolutely get a successor of sorts. Likely a more mass-market take. That will tie in with Brick and Mortar launch plans. 4. Bonus points: SteamOS is designed around AMD hardware. AMD makes the hardware in the PS5 and XSX. It is not a stretch to consider Valve just diving deep into a $499 non-portable console/PC hybrid with custom silicon by AMD. Hell, even Tesla did it.

NineStarPoint 4y ago

Microsoft is definitely pivoting towards making most of their money from their subscription game pass, with the idea that even if their consoles do sub-par they can also gain money from PC users and try and eat into Steam’s market share. Given how many game studios they’ve been buying, I don’t know whether it’s smart to bet against them (even considering their spotty history with studio acquisition). While I have a hard time imagining Sony making another play at the handheld market after two failures, maybe they’ll realize that if they actually market it well and don’t use weird non-standard hardware like the PSP’s did they’d stand a better chance.

ekianjo 4y ago
I don't think it's fair to categorize the first PSP as a failure. It did very well market-wise, even though it did not sell as much as the DS.
- NineStarPoint 4y ago
  You’re right, actually even the PS Vita sold more than 10 million which is better than I expected (It was a WiiU, not a Sega CD/Virtual Boy) . I’ll have to remember that in the future.
agloe_dreams 4y ago
> Microsoft is definitely pivoting towards making most of their money from their subscription game pass I'm not convinced this is going to be a winning strategy. It clearly doesn't work for TV/Movies. I'm not kidding. The model of "grow as fast a possible" means low prices and lots of content. Once the bean counters show up, the prices go up and content development becomes a trickle. Look at Netflix. By that point, it is way easier to launch a product with preorders to pay off investment. Microsoft's key play will be that they own the console and can force game pass/etc but seemingly, gamers prefer the other platforms so they may run. If Valve builds a living room next-gen console from Steam OS, they may have the most well-liked platform for devs.
philistine 4y ago
Look at the Xbox Series S. Microsoft has already fragmented the target hardware for consoles. Sony or Microsoft could conceivably make something akin to a portable Series S in four to five years. The delta between the TV console and the portable one would be greater however.

kibwen 4y ago

> that sounds like a flop to my book It would be a flop for a traditional console, but the Steam Deck isn't a console, it's a PC. The reason that consoles need massive sales is because consoles have a limited repertoire of games (at best, they might be backwards-compatible with the previous-generation console), so they need large sales to demonstrate an install base and convince developers to make games for the platform. But if you're compatible with PC software, you don't care about that. Valve doesn't need to entice anyone to make PC games; the install base for the Steam Deck is the entire PC market. And with the help of emulators, a PC has access to multiple orders of magnitude more games than any existing console. So the metric for success for the Steam Deck isn't to compare it to a console, rather it's to compare it to other specific PC form factors (e.g. a specific model of laptop).

Kukumber 4y ago
> It would be a flop for a traditional console, but the Steam Deck isn't a console, it's a PC I don't think people use it as a PC, but more like as a portable media center, the Switch and the PSP do that as well (even the PSP had a web browser!) So it's wrong to picture the Deck as the exception, even thought it can and is a supported use case They sell it and market its gaming capabilities https://store.steampowered.com/steamdeck https://store.steampowered.com/steamdeck You see games, not office apps, emails or social media apps, you don't have front facing camera so you can't use it for your meetings
- ghodith 4y ago
  You've misunderstood the point. It's not that people use it like a PC that matters, it's that it's compatible with PC games.