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While screen sizes have increased since the game boy era, device sizes have not if you’re comparing to phones which are the true successor to that kind of casua
by dagmx 2y ago
While screen sizes have increased since the game boy era, device sizes have not if you’re comparing to phones which are the true successor to that kind of casual gaming.
The average mobile phone is smaller than most generations of game boy.
Additionally, unless you’re purposefully buying phablets or only used the mini/micro/sp, device sizes on phones hasn’t been increasing significantly over the last decade. In most cases, it’s the bezels getting smaller and screen sizes growing to be a larger part of the same device size.
Here are a smattering of measurements in millimetres. By volume, modern phones are way smaller. The biggest change is they’re longer in one dimension, but still very comparable. .
Original Gameboy 148mm (height) x 90mm (width) x 32mm (depth)
Gameboy advance 81mm x 140mm x23mm
Pixel 9 152.8 x 72 x 8.5 mm
Gameboy mini 101.5 x 52.5 x 15.5 mm
Gameboy advance SP 82x23x84
Gameboy Micro 101 x 50 x 17.2
iPhone 16 147.6 × 71.6 × 7.8 mm
Taking the pixel vs the advance for volume, the Pixel is only 35% of the GBA, or if you take by area, ignoring depth, Pixel is 96% of the size of the GBA.
If your pockets could fit a GBA, they certainly can fit a standard mobile phone.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- cubefox 2y agoInteresting comparison. Though I believe he was comparing GBA to Switch, not GBA to phones. Phones just exhibit a similar trend (older phones were smaller than current ones).
- gxd 2y agoCorrect. Phones are getting bigger (but thinner) compared to older phones while portable consoles are getting bigger compared to older consoles.
- dagmx 2y agoThat’s only true if you consider all portable consoles in the same category. There’s always been a market for the large portable console, also with the promise of docking. It’s just that compute was difficult to achieve until recently, and the market for the small end has been eaten by phones, and so they only make the larger end now. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_handheld_game_consoles?wprov=sfti1# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_handheld_game_consoles...
- cubefox 2y agoI think the main problem with large handheld consoles in the past was that large or high resolution LCD screens were quite expensive for a long time. And everyone overestimated how much people valued the console being pocket sized.
- cubefox 2y agoAnd I believe the Switch successor will be larger still. So the trend hasn't stopped yet.
- dagmx 2y agoWell, they compared both. But realistically, there’s always been three categories to personal compute and gaming. For lack of better words, mobile, portable and home use. Mobile was the gameboy and now the mobile phone. Portable back then was the game gear and sega nomad. Today it’s the switch, steamdeck, and for a while the PSP and PS Vita. These provide cut down versions of home console games or better fidelity than truly mobile. Home use being permanently plugged in like the SNES/N64. It’s not that the small handhelds have gotten bigger, it’s just that they’ve stopped making stuff in that smallest category. The fact is that mobile phones have taken over that mobile market completely. There’s no space to compete so that market is dead for game console makers. This has been the trajectory for decades now.
- ppseafield 2y agoThere is a niche for small, mobile handhelds, with companies such as Retroid and Ambernic making devices with smaller screens. Interestingly even in this niche the proportion of truly mobile vs. portable is seeing the same continuing shift to larger, more powerful handhelds over time. It seems in all categories people tend to purchase devices with larger screens. I wonder if this is caused by the nowadays much larger proportion of adults using these devices, where the Gameboy, etc., we're seen more as children's toys - meaning smaller form factors and screens might have been a better fit.
- dagmx 2y agoThe Gameboy was designed and marketed to be casual gaming on the go (while commuting etc) as well as for children. It was the spiritual successor to the Game&Watch after all. Those sorts of games are best suited to smaller screens but that’s the market that smartphones have basically taken over. So if you need to differentiate a gaming product from the smartphones that everyone owns, you kind of need things like bigger screens, better ergonomics and more immersive games etc