Switch (and to a greater extent Switch 2) is brilliant hardware, don’t get me wrong. I like it. It’s well built, great screen, suspend works great, docking is awesome, etc.
But I don’t like that it killed (or at least marked the end of) the old handheld gaming paradigm. Some of this is undoubtedly nostalgia, but I think there’s things that were objectively better about the old way.
Around the time of 3DS launching smartphone gaming was taking off, and for a moment it looked promising which really hindered sales of handheld consoles. There were tons of innovative, fun experiences available at low prices. This pushed companies away from handhelds. It’s a lot tougher sell when people have smartphones now.
But then smartphone gaming turned into a barren hellscape of ads and fremium mtx ridden slop. I don’t know about you, but despite owning high end smartphones I have literally no games on my phone. Not to say that no good smartphone games exist… But they have such a huge uphill battle - nobody buys mobile games because they assume they’re trash, and they don’t have the necessary advertising budget to fight the big names in mobile gaming. So the selection is small and hard to find.
Then there’s the ports like Minecraft and Fortnite/etc, which are also loaded with mtx nowadays. But smartphones seem like the absolute last choice platform for these titles. Nothing I hate more than playing a game designed for a controller on a touchscreen.
So say I go to pick a friend up from the airport and I have 20 minutes to wait because their flight was a bit late. What to do? I could play a game on my Switch. Totally a feasible option. Except, I almost certainly didn’t bring it. Why would I? It’s a fairly large device. And with the big exposed screen and analog sticks I’d have to case it up too. I’m not grabbing that thing “just in case”. So I grab my phone and doomscrool. Not because I want to, but because… What else am I gonna do?
But let’s say I had a 3DS… Pocketable (or easily fitting into a modest sized purse). I can take it without thinking. No case needed, it’s a clamshell. May as well keep it on me. Plus I can grab some Streetpass passes (when that was a thing) which basically gamifies the action of taking it everywhere. I’d probably spend those 20 minutes playing something on the 3DS.
That’s the thing. Tablet sized portables like Switch/2, Steam Deck, etc are technically portable, but I have to plan it. If I’m going on a road trip yeah awesome those consoles are insanely good. But in my day to day life they never leave the house. The extent of portability really means I might play them in bed instead of the living room. The Switch Lite is definitely an improvement, but it’s still not the size it would need to be to become effortless to bring around.
And the games. Switch/Switch 2 games are mostly just home console games that can be played on a handheld. We don’t get nearly as many of those smaller games designed for 10-30 minute play sessions. The type of games that used to be developed for handhelds. This is 10x as true on PC handhelds. I mean, such games do exist no doubt they’re just a lot smaller part of the market. We don’t see big studios putting money into them like we’d see them do for dedicated handhelds of the past. That’s not to say there weren’t big epic stories meant for long sessions on old handhelds, but they weren’t the main type of games on them.
I understand why things are the way they are. I get it. But I don’t like it. Some might ask why I don’t just carry an old handheld - I have been! With the modern modding scene the 3DS is insanely good. I’ve had a blast with it and have been playing a ton of games from the library I never got around to back in the day plus emulators for older consoles etc. You can even play online again with community servers. But it would be really sweet to have new games to look forward to, and an active community and support.
Then there’s new like, boutique handhelds out there like the Ayn Thor etc. They look awesome and I’ll probably pick one up one day, but honestly it has the same problem as my 3DS. No new exciting stuff coming. No big community.
I don’t forsee things changing anytime soon… But I feel like if things were just a bit different they could. Like, graphics have kinda plateaued in the past 2 generations of consoles. Developers can’t really say their games are held back by graphical limitations much anymore. Let’s say the Switch 2 has an 8 year lifecycle - the Switch 3 could be a dockable handheld clamshell the size of a 3DS XL. Skip the 2 screen thing. With advances in processing/battery tech, I think in 8 years they could do that and still have graphics marginally better than S2 (but maybe not as big of a leap as S1 -> S2) and with a lot more RAM/vRAM assuming the RAMpocalypse ends by then. It could be a pocketable handheld that can still do 1080p gaming on TV while docked, keeping the single device benefit for development cost savings that the Switch brings.
I don’t actually think that’ll happen, but a person can dream eh?
Anyway thanks for reading my rant.
For phones I recommend emulators. Games from 30 years ago were less likely to have microtransactions, DLC, and all that bullshit
You kids and your microtransactions and Deal-Cs.
When I was your age, we would go to the mall with a roll of quarters and feed them into into big TVs with plastic guns hanging off the side. You’d shoot at the screen and the screen would shoot back. Every game cost a quarter. So we’d say “3 lives for a quarter”. They would sell you blue soda in these big cups called “Freezies”. And you could get a pretzel the size of your arm for a dollar.
Can’t do that anymore. On account of the woke.
In addition to that, I’d also add that modding a 3ds is exceptionally simple. It also helps give access to nonnative software and mods to make your current games more fun (i.e. randomizers). I still play my 3ds, since it has my all-time favorite game, and I can still play a lot of my backlog.
My Steam Deck lives in my backpack and yes, i would have taken it to the airport.
Others have covered various points with better words than I can, so I’m going to share a website that is covering mobile phone games releases. not affiliated in any way
Is was developed and maintained by a youtuber covering mobile games. Although he haven’t uploaded to youtube in a year. And I don’t usually check the site so it could be outdated.
And I see mobile ports of pc games are taking more care in translating physical controls to touch screen controls. Still not the rule and definitely the exception, but it is out there. Latest one I remember off the top of my head is balatro and ballxpit.
Aren’t there a few chinese companies that make highly portable machine for emulation.
I own a trimui brick and my gf has a miyoo mini plus. Great devices for the price and purpose
My kid is a Nintendo Game Boy Advanced SP connoisseur. I’ve looked into modern versions like the Miyoo, but after getting two broken in a row trying to get a Christmas present together I gave up. GBA-SP still works thpugh!
All of this could be so easily fixed if only we had linux phones. I’d like to just have my entire steam/gog/itchio libraries just on my phone as I’ve already bought those games and I should be able to just play them on the devices I already own.
That’s cool and all, but but I don’t get the relavence.
It’s a pocketable Linux phone.
is it? I didn’t see shit in the advertisement material that it was
Well, good question since nothing is out yet. But they’ve said that it’s gonna be a Sailfish phone.
Beats me how they’re gonna make the UI work in a clamshell form factor. Probably gonna have to rewrite that layer completely.
This could be blamed on game developer brain drain. These are low-powered devices, and they need people writing game logic to have some idea of hardware-level efficiency, not let a 500-feature engine do the work for them.
There’s no way to remake these devices without them taking up oodles of power, thus burning a hole in your pocket. Phones come close (it’s damn impressive what visuals Gacha games can achieve on phones) but even they are losing efficiency with time.
I am late to this thread but I upgraded from my almost 20 year old DS Lite with an R4 card to an AYN Thor which I genuinely recommend since a good quality New 3DS may run you about the same money. Go for 3DS if you have friends who still use DS/3DS.
Skip the 2 screen thing
No need, AYN proved your entire idea with the Thor with both screens as AMOLED. The base model is going for $330, so its absolutely possible. I would even bet it could take a solid chunk of the Switch 2 library despite a weaker GPU, and it can definitely do Switch 1 games and lots of Steam games.
The one downside with Thor is that there is no DS/3DS wireless local multiplayer (yet) because of latency shenanigans which is something I actually want to work on but haven’t had the time to do. The upside tradeoff is that you can play modern steam and switch games on it as well, both in Android and Linux (Rocknix). It is a very well made console despite the smaller audience of 3rd party consoles. And community is actually decently sized with lots of cutsom launchers, themes, addons, styluses, cases, etc.
Nintendo had some of the greatest technology in their hand with stuff like streetpass and download play, yet they threw it all away for the Switch era which effectively killed the handheld multiplayer scene. I think I only used my switch in local wireless multiplayer once ever. Everything else was either smash bros or split screen mariokart. As you said, it’s just a home console that’s portable.
This might sound dumb, but I don’t want to see current Nintendo pursue a proper handheld again because I know they are not capable of doing so in the same manner that the DS and 3DS was successful. They have been making absolute bank on Switch and Switch 2 sales despite paywalling stuff that used to be included for free in the DS/Wii era and removing the core essentials of what made those consoles so good.
They could have easily repurposed those ideas for their mobile games, but they didn’t. Instead we just got more paywalled slop despite having access to new tech like NFC, Bluetooth, WiFi Aware, gyro in every phone, etc. Even Pokemon GO was a 3rd party reskin, not a Nintendo original game.
A proper successor to the 3DS could absolutely shred the market, but I just don’t see Nintendo doing it correctly.
I really wanted to respond to this immediately, but I had to gather my thoughts.
In general, I agree. We lost something. But the issue is that in the corporate world the mobiles cannibalized this.
A mobile is capable of gaming, of course. Even leaving download, microtransactions and gacha aside, the controls and the OS are suboptimal regarding this.
Of course mobile fans will say get used to touchscreen (I admire people successfully playing dead cells on there) and you could just pair a controller. Well, partly true.
It massively takes from the just play simplicity especially of consoles. I want it to just work (like putting a game in switch or plugging vr into ps5 vs pc/derivates).
For me the peak was foldable console gaming, GBA SP, Nintendo DS and 3DS (while psp and vita were also great).
We lost the - as op said - pocketability of a console gaming system, all included and hassle free ready to go and just working as is.
i had the latest 3ds when they forced the pokemon games to switch, that was my last console owned, made the right decision since pokemon has only enshittfied further.
There are a shit ton of handhelds ranging from a lot of budgets, wulffden made a great video about any that he could get his hands on.
Edit: Should have finished reading before I started talking, I see you already know about these emulation handhelds. I’ll still leave the link up for anyone curious.
I adore my RETROID Pocket Flip v2
Another big issue with smartphone gaming is platform decay. The stores require you to constantly update or your game gets kicked off. There are tons of great games that have no legit way to play them, and others are completely lost with no backups existing. I have some games on my phone I can’t delete without risking losing access to them altogether.
Meanwhile I can go put rhythmn heaven in my gba and play it right now.
Even Android itself can be emulated. But that doesn’t save games with online dependencies
I’m pretty sure someone made pants to make the Steam Deck or similar pocketable…
Jokes aside, if they were pocketable, you couldn’t run modern AAA games on them, then gamers would non-stop whine about it. You can still get some pocketable handhelds with Android OS (or a Chinese fork of it), and likely that will be my next portable device if Google will go through with closing down the Android ecosystem, and my S23 Ultra will go bad.
You’ve got small pockets
