Smartphone and console market

[MarkoIt]

These are pretty impressive number. With this kind of grow, by 2012, smartphones will get the bigger slice of the portable market. And in a not too distant future, they may even put pressure on the home console market.

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/18/ios-and-android-continue-chipping-away-at-mobile-gaming-market/

 

[Nesh]

I think its going to be a long time before they put pressure to the console market.
Portables fall in between the console and mobile phone experience, so as a product it has some "identity" problem.
Consoles and mobile phones on the other hand have very dtstinctive and clear experiences that dont compete against each other much. One offers the expensive rich experiences and the other extremely cheap games to play on the go
Only when mobile phones become powerful enough to have the ability to offer couch experiences and multi million projects comparable to that of consoles they will start eating out of console market share.

For that to going to happen I envision an all in one portable device that can be plagged to your TV, Home Theater, have console like accessories and in general do anything yoru console can do.

But there is one problem with that. Mobile devices are targeted for personal use. It is an individual experience device. Whereas a console is also family entertainment device. Being mobile means once you carry it with you, someone else in the household will not be able to access it.

Even if what I am saying will be an evolution in the far future the natural evolution before that happens is that mobile devices will become complimentaries to the consoles.

They will have inetrconnectivity between them, share media, carry over progress, and might offer communication between home user and mobile user through various forms of entertainment. Better yet they can add to the experience as an additional input device with a similar concept communicated by the NGP announcement and the next gen controller for the next Nintendo console.
They will go hand in hand. The market shares will look more equal but the numbers will be larger as absolutes for both because the console owner will be motivated to also have a mobile device that communicates with the console through games and apps that handshake with console software

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Of course, this is US-only, which is by no means representative of what's happening elsewhere.

The smartphone market in the US is dominated by "superphones" being sold cheap along with 2-year contracts, so gaming-capable high-end smartphones are have a much larger install-base in the U.S. than the rest of the world.

Not to mention that 2010 was the last year of the (exclusively sold) 7th-gen portable consoles, with the 3DS long announced for Q1 2011. It's no surprise that software sales for portable consoles went down, as people are now expecting the next-gen.
2011 and 2012 should be a whole other story.

BTW, software sales for the Xperia Play should go where? Consoles or smartphone? The device is both..


Not that I don't think the smartphone games market will continue to rise and eventually match\surpass the portable consoles, but it'll be nowhere near the year-on-year growth we see in that top chart.

 

[Cheezdoodles]

Of course, this is US-only, which is by no means representative of what's happening elsewhere.

The smartphone market in the US is dominated by "superphones" being sold cheap along with 2-year contracts, so gaming-capable high-end smartphones are have a much larger install-base in the U.S. than the rest of the world..

This exactly the same way they sell phones in every industrialized country!

Show me statistics supporting this - compared to western europe or other economies with similar wealth levels.

Of course, vs the rest of the world is mindblowingly stupid comparison. Its obvious that people in africa etc don't have many smartphones, (neither do they own many consoles).

 

[dobwal]

Of course, this is US-only, which is by no means representative of what's happening elsewhere.

The smartphone market in the US is dominated by "superphones" being sold cheap along with 2-year contracts, so gaming-capable high-end smartphones are have a much larger install-base in the U.S. than the rest of the world.

Not to mention that 2010 was the last year of the (exclusively sold) 7th-gen portable consoles, with the 3DS long announced for Q1 2011. It's no surprise that software sales for portable consoles went down, as people are now expecting the next-gen.
2011 and 2012 should be a whole other story.

BTW, software sales for the Xperia Play should go where? Consoles or smartphone? The device is both..


Not that I don't think the smartphone games market will continue to rise and eventually match\surpass the portable consoles, but it'll be nowhere near the year-on-year growth we see in that top chart.

There are 230K iOS and 350K Android devices activated daily worldwide. While the flagship iOS and Android devices get the most marketing and thus are the most visible. iOS and Android device on the major US carriers can be had from $300 dollars on a 2 year contract down to free with a 2 year contract. Most of the sales outside of the iphone4 and ipad2 aren't being driven by flagship products but rather superphones and tabs that can be had at cheap prices.

When Apple and Google are activating 580K devices a day its not hard to see why mobile phones games are growing at such a phenemonal pace. And at 200 million activations a year I doubt those purchases are coming mostly within the US.