The Future of Portable Gaming
Five years ago Nintendo launched The Switch, their most successful console to date. They also sbegan to restructure their hardware and software development teams, particularly merging their portable and home console teams into one. The Switch, a hybrid system that connects to your tv and is also able to play all of its software on the go- it sounded like a dream for me and many other gamers. Personally as a strictly portable gamer this was a prayer answered as I wouldn’t miss out on big title releases, no longer would I have to choose between multiple platforms.
The accessibility suddenly grew over night. This also meant leaving behind reliable platforms, specifically the DS Family was sent out to pasture. I and many other gamers made the transition immediately trading in our systems for the dual functionality that the switch had to offer. The transition felt immediate.
I’ve been playing portable games all the way since the GameBoy days. I could tell you when and where I bought all of my portable systems. While mostly dominated by Nintendo crafted experiences I did have exposure to other systems like the Sega Gamegear and NeoGeo Pocket Color. Being able to place a robust game console in my pockets was always something I loved about Portable Games. There is a blank spot in my history mainly with the PSP and Vita and perhaps my criticisms should be saved for another day so I won’t go into why I avoided those line of systems.
The Portable market literally exploded over night through the vacancy left by Nintendo’s dominance. In 2019 Google announced Stadia, a game service that would allow players to stream console quality games with just their tablets or PCs. Apple also launched Apple Arcade, a service for mobile games to be played on their devices and also promised higher fidelity than what mobile gamers were used to. Nintendo also began to offer larger titles for streaming on the Switch, bringing more recently released titles to their hybrid system. In 2021 Xbox announced Cloud Gaming would be available through their Game Pass service allowing players to play select games on their PC, Phone or tablet of choice and that they would be expanding the service to their own consoles.
I signed up for Stadia, but felt the selection to be lackluster. I also signed up for Apple Arcade, but found their titles needing more polish. Even when playing with a controller on my tv via Apple TV, the experiences were thin. When I signed up for Game Pass it felt more like buying a system without actually owning it. The quality of titles and availability of new ones added every month gave me an instant backlog of titles I’d never had access to like Mass Effect, Forza and Yakuza.
I played these games on my iPad and found the experience to not be chopped up by lag, but to my surprise running butter smooth. The future had arrived and I was ready for it. Adjacent to these events smaller developers had announced their own system releases. The Playdate promises smaller homebrew quality of games allowing players to download new games every month as well as being able to develop games for the system. Not to be outdone is the Analogue Pocket the be all end all of portable retro systems looking to everyone’s pocket with the form factor of the original GameBoy while offering adapters for various other handheld systems. Valve also announced their own robust portable, a chunky model that can play games from Steam that also can connect to a larger screen, The Steam Deck shipping in February.
Handheld and portable games are truly necessary in our gaming ecosystem. Streaming is here to stay and will likely impact portable gaming the most. The variety of accessibility proves it and going forward I hope that major console developers keep portable gaming in their future.
