5 ms·

I strongly disagree, mobile and console/PC gaming are not competing. It’s a completely different audience, different games and so on. I’d consider them mostly s

I strongly disagree, mobile and console/PC gaming are not competing. It’s a completely different audience, different games and so on. I’d consider them mostly separate markets. The Switch tried to bridge the gap but really didn’t.

zagrebian 3y ago
> The Switch tried to bridge the gap but really didn’t. What would the Switch have needed to accomplish to bridge the gap to mobile? Sell 1 billion units?
- bombcar 3y ago
  Allow horrible gatcha games
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    They do, there are some gacha on the switch. Most notably, Genshin was trying to promise a Switch port, but never delivered.
- tolmasky 3y ago
  To be clear, “mobile” is a distinct category from “handheld”. I am not OP, but to answer your question, I think the idea is that to bridge the gap with mobile gaming the Switch would have to… actually compete in that space. IOW, it has nothing to do with sales. Not many people are considering whether to buy a Switch instead of Candy Crush on their phone. If you ask me how many toasters you have to sell to prove to me you’re in the mobile gaming space, I’d reply that you’re committing a category error. You could sell 1 trillion toasters and still not succeed in “bridging the gap between making toast and mobile gaming”. This is of course a hyperbolic example, and gaming is a gradient with more grey areas and plenty of overlap, but arguably “mobile gaming” in particular is so different from the rest that it is fair to categorize quite differently. There is a good argument that it should if anything instead be compared to gambling from a business model perspective, or social media / content consumption given its expected use environment (on the bus, waiting in line, in bed, etc.).
  - philipov 3y ago
    Right, the switch wouldn't be competing with Mobile Games, it would be competing with Mobile Phones. So, to compete in that space, the Switch would have had to be a mobile phone. Maybe they could have gotten away with being a Tablet.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      It's competing for a similar audience. But phones target a wider audience. There are very much high spec phones marketed to play the highest fidelity games, so it's not like there are no console gamers who consider mobile gaming.
  - Schnitz 3y ago
    Exactly. If you ask me, it would have to run the latest triple A games like F1, Call of Duty, FIFA, Elden Ring, Dirt, etc very well and be an attractive platform for that kind of gaming. The FTC is IMHO correct when they see Xbox, Play Station and Windows as one market and Switch in another. People usually have the latest Play Station or Xbox, not both, but lots of people have a Switch in addition to either.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    At the same time this metaphor works in reverse. There wee very much people who don't see the appeal of a 3DS becsuse "I have free games on my phone". And the 3DS lost a lot of its market due to that. Pokemon wasn't enough for the first time in some 20 years. And then Some part of The Pokemon Company released Pokemon Go and it was clear that the lines were blurry. Gaming or non-gaming, I can't find someone who didn't at least tinker with POGO in the few 2 months. I think it's a bit silly to suggest that there isnt a decent overlap in the market. Any Japanese company has a mobile division, and they all utilize their console IP's there. They wouldn't do that if all their audience were candy crush players.
scheeseman486 3y ago
They all compete with each other since they're all competing for your time, there's just specializations that make them more attractive in certain situations. If I'm at home poking at a gem game at my phone, that's still taking up time that could be spent on a console. If I'm out and about, it's time that could be spent on a Switch or Steam Deck, or possibly cloud streaming. There's plenty of overlap between all of them. Hell, most mobile games are mostly adaptions of what are usually called casual or what used to be called "desktop" games on PC. Genshin Impact is an open world RPG, there's CoD Mobile and Mario Kart too. There's a habit to separate various kinds of media in it's own little lockboxes and it's completely wrongheaded and old fashioned in an age where tech is consolidating so rapidly.
- BeFlatXIII 3y ago
  > They all compete with each other since they're all competing for your time But they have largely separate audiences. The number of people for whom they are in legitimate competition is vanishingly small compared to those who are exclusively on one side of the divide or the other.
  - scheeseman486 3y ago
    Do they? Most people and households I know, particularly families, have products from all categories, with those who play games gravitating to dedicated hardware (mobile, console, PC etc) as opposed to phones and tablets. Mobile, console, PC, handheld? Potato Potahto. I can play PC games on a handheld. I can play Xbox games on an iPhone. I can play Switch games on a PC. I can play "Mobile" games on a TV box. The industry is so busy categorizing that they missed that everything runs on everything now.
- amanaplanacanal 3y ago
  > They all compete with each other since they're all competing for your time But if you define the market that way, it probably also includes books, movies, television, and sports. Not so useful when working on antitrust.
  - 3y ago
Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago
I think the op is right. Try to sell mobile games to "console/pc gamers", you just don't sell them, different market. From a personal perspective, all my friends who play videogames avoid mobile like plague.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  On the other hand, my friend group have all played some mobile games at some point. I think it really comes down to genre. These were a bunch of weebs who also played stuff like Final Fantasy 14. And many mobile games marketed towards those current/former RPG players are similar in all but raw technical scope (and even then, we have Genshin impact now. That gap is closing). But sure, if your friend group focuses on FPS or fighters I can see a lack of interest.
  - Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago
    I have no problem with the mobile platform itself, it's that usually all the games are terrible. The few that are on mobile usually have a counterpart on steam, with the steam deck that lost all the interest
underdeserver 3y ago
The Switch didn't really try to bridge the gap, the games are different. There are no Tears of the Kingdom or Mario Odyssey on phones.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  Genshin impact was mocked in the gaming space as a Breath of the Wild clone. So i don't think that angle is correct. No one has tried to really make a 3d platformer mobile game, though. I wonder how much of that is due to technical/logistical issues and how much due to lack of audience demand. There are some 2D platformers, so that's not the issue.
- opan 3y ago
  I haven't played it, but Genshin Impact is often compared to Breath of the Wild.

zagrebian 3y ago

> The Switch tried to bridge the gap but really didn’t. What would the Switch have needed to accomplish to bridge the gap to mobile? Sell 1 billion units?

bombcar 3y ago
Allow horrible gatcha games
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  They do, there are some gacha on the switch. Most notably, Genshin was trying to promise a Switch port, but never delivered.
tolmasky 3y ago
To be clear, “mobile” is a distinct category from “handheld”. I am not OP, but to answer your question, I think the idea is that to bridge the gap with mobile gaming the Switch would have to… actually compete in that space. IOW, it has nothing to do with sales. Not many people are considering whether to buy a Switch instead of Candy Crush on their phone. If you ask me how many toasters you have to sell to prove to me you’re in the mobile gaming space, I’d reply that you’re committing a category error. You could sell 1 trillion toasters and still not succeed in “bridging the gap between making toast and mobile gaming”. This is of course a hyperbolic example, and gaming is a gradient with more grey areas and plenty of overlap, but arguably “mobile gaming” in particular is so different from the rest that it is fair to categorize quite differently. There is a good argument that it should if anything instead be compared to gambling from a business model perspective, or social media / content consumption given its expected use environment (on the bus, waiting in line, in bed, etc.).
- philipov 3y ago
  Right, the switch wouldn't be competing with Mobile Games, it would be competing with Mobile Phones. So, to compete in that space, the Switch would have had to be a mobile phone. Maybe they could have gotten away with being a Tablet.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    It's competing for a similar audience. But phones target a wider audience. There are very much high spec phones marketed to play the highest fidelity games, so it's not like there are no console gamers who consider mobile gaming.
- Schnitz 3y ago
  Exactly. If you ask me, it would have to run the latest triple A games like F1, Call of Duty, FIFA, Elden Ring, Dirt, etc very well and be an attractive platform for that kind of gaming. The FTC is IMHO correct when they see Xbox, Play Station and Windows as one market and Switch in another. People usually have the latest Play Station or Xbox, not both, but lots of people have a Switch in addition to either.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  At the same time this metaphor works in reverse. There wee very much people who don't see the appeal of a 3DS becsuse "I have free games on my phone". And the 3DS lost a lot of its market due to that. Pokemon wasn't enough for the first time in some 20 years. And then Some part of The Pokemon Company released Pokemon Go and it was clear that the lines were blurry. Gaming or non-gaming, I can't find someone who didn't at least tinker with POGO in the few 2 months. I think it's a bit silly to suggest that there isnt a decent overlap in the market. Any Japanese company has a mobile division, and they all utilize their console IP's there. They wouldn't do that if all their audience were candy crush players.

scheeseman486 3y ago

They all compete with each other since they're all competing for your time, there's just specializations that make them more attractive in certain situations. If I'm at home poking at a gem game at my phone, that's still taking up time that could be spent on a console. If I'm out and about, it's time that could be spent on a Switch or Steam Deck, or possibly cloud streaming. There's plenty of overlap between all of them. Hell, most mobile games are mostly adaptions of what are usually called casual or what used to be called "desktop" games on PC. Genshin Impact is an open world RPG, there's CoD Mobile and Mario Kart too. There's a habit to separate various kinds of media in it's own little lockboxes and it's completely wrongheaded and old fashioned in an age where tech is consolidating so rapidly.

BeFlatXIII 3y ago
> They all compete with each other since they're all competing for your time But they have largely separate audiences. The number of people for whom they are in legitimate competition is vanishingly small compared to those who are exclusively on one side of the divide or the other.
- scheeseman486 3y ago
  Do they? Most people and households I know, particularly families, have products from all categories, with those who play games gravitating to dedicated hardware (mobile, console, PC etc) as opposed to phones and tablets. Mobile, console, PC, handheld? Potato Potahto. I can play PC games on a handheld. I can play Xbox games on an iPhone. I can play Switch games on a PC. I can play "Mobile" games on a TV box. The industry is so busy categorizing that they missed that everything runs on everything now.
amanaplanacanal 3y ago
> They all compete with each other since they're all competing for your time But if you define the market that way, it probably also includes books, movies, television, and sports. Not so useful when working on antitrust.
- 3y ago

Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago

I think the op is right. Try to sell mobile games to "console/pc gamers", you just don't sell them, different market. From a personal perspective, all my friends who play videogames avoid mobile like plague.

johnnyanmac 3y ago
On the other hand, my friend group have all played some mobile games at some point. I think it really comes down to genre. These were a bunch of weebs who also played stuff like Final Fantasy 14. And many mobile games marketed towards those current/former RPG players are similar in all but raw technical scope (and even then, we have Genshin impact now. That gap is closing). But sure, if your friend group focuses on FPS or fighters I can see a lack of interest.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago
  I have no problem with the mobile platform itself, it's that usually all the games are terrible. The few that are on mobile usually have a counterpart on steam, with the steam deck that lost all the interest

underdeserver 3y ago

The Switch didn't really try to bridge the gap, the games are different. There are no Tears of the Kingdom or Mario Odyssey on phones.

johnnyanmac 3y ago
Genshin impact was mocked in the gaming space as a Breath of the Wild clone. So i don't think that angle is correct. No one has tried to really make a 3d platformer mobile game, though. I wonder how much of that is due to technical/logistical issues and how much due to lack of audience demand. There are some 2D platformers, so that's not the issue.
opan 3y ago
I haven't played it, but Genshin Impact is often compared to Breath of the Wild.