A new wave of handheld consoles is changing the gaming landscape… here’s how

During the height of the pandemic, Valve—best known for the online app store, Steam, and creator of one of the most popular and long-running esports titles Counter-Strike—took the plunge by entering the handheld market with Steam Deck. A handheld gaming device that could take your Steam library wherever you go but is also incredibly easy to use and packs a lot of power to run AAA games. Starting at $399 (or approx Rs 32,691), the Steam Deck simply worked because it brought PC gaming on a handheld machine without too many sacrifices. Research firm Omida estimates Valve’s Steam Deck will reach over 3 million units in 2023, an encouraging figure given the device is currently available in a handful of markets globally.

The PlayStation Vita’s cross-play feature was unique but Sony couldn’t able to unitise it properly. (Image credit: Anuj Bhatia/Indian Express)

The portable gaming market has been dominated by Nintendo for years. The Japanese gaming giant first entered the portable gaming segment with the Game & Watch line in the early 80s. Nintendo’s tryst with handheld gaming continued further when it released the Game Boy in 1989 which went on to sell millions of units, establishing the Mario maker as the king of handheld consoles. There was no looking back for Nintendo. Its next big portable gaming machine was the Nintendo DS (DS standing for dual screen), which opened a new dimension to gaming by adding a second screen. Then came the Nintendo 3DS which gave games a three-dimensional appearance without the use of glasses, and Nintendo’s most recent handheld offering, the Switch, can be played handheld or plugged into any TV or monitor with the included docking station.

Game historians believe that Nintendo has a monopoly on the handheld gaming market, which is true. Over the years, big gaming companies such as Sony and Sega all tried their hands at handheld gaming but failed to dethrone Nintendo despite having more powerful hardware. Sony’s PlayStation Portable or PSP was more advanced than the DS, offering smooth gameplay and better graphics combined with the promise of delivering big titles such as God of War: Chains of Olympus and Grand Theft Auto: Vice CityStories on a handheld form factor. The PSP was a successful portable console selling over 80 million units in its lifetime; that number was nowhere close to the DS’s 154 million units sold.

Nintendo capitalised on games and unique gameplay to sell the 3DS. (Image credit: Anuj Bhatia/Indian Express)

Sony then once again tried to take on Nintendo with the PlayStation Vita in 2011 but the system was a commercial failure. Sony promised PS3-like visuals on the PS Vita, a portable device that offered an OLED screen with two sticks for FPS and third-person shooter gameplay. Its debut game, Uncharted: Golden Abyss, showed the capability of the system but that was not enough to persuade a hardcore PlayStation fan to shell out $249 on the Vita. This time, more than Nintendo’s 3DS XL, it was the burgeoning mobile gaming market that came as a bottleneck in front of the PlayStation Vita.

Around 2012, smartphones started to take off among mainstream users. Phones weren’t just to attend calls and access social media but they could also be used to play games, more so casual free-to-play games catering to a wider demographic. In a matter of a few years, as graphics improved, smartphones started to rival dedicated handheld devices like the Nintendo 3DS XL and Sony’s PlayStation Vita. The industry was changing, and suddenly the PlayStation Vita was in the middle of nowhere. The first-party games were drying up and the Vita’s exclusives lacked the mainstream appeal. However, Nintendo was untouched by the onslaught of mobile gaming. Its 3DS XL was different and had Nintendo’s signature games, enough to differentiate its system from smartphones.

Gaming smartphones have started to feel out of place in the changing gaming landscape. It has a lot to do with mobile games, which cater to casual gamers who don’t want to spend Rs 50,000 on a gaming phone. (Image credit: Anuj Bhatia/Indian Express)

The failure of the PlayStation Vita was the end of Sony’s experiment with the handheld gaming market. The industry, too, gave up on the dedicated portable gaming space, except for Nintendo. At a time when people were choosing high-end smartphones to play games over traditional consoles, Nintendo surprised everyone by launching the Switch in 2017. The hybrid console shook the industry, and six years on, the craze for Switch hasn’t faded out. It, in fact, has only grown. The device not only redefined handheld gaming but the bumper success of the Switch allowed developers to think out-of-the-box in creating the most innovative games. Not just that, Nintendo has also been able to successfully create an ecosystem of accessories around a single product that only Apple has done before.

More importantly, the Switch established that handheld gaming can co-exist with smartphones. Although mobile gaming may be more lucrative than console and PC gaming combined, the truth is gaming on mobile is suited for specific genres. Casual games still work best on smartphones and there is a huge audience for that. But those who grew up playing casual games on mobiles when they were young are now adults and expect more from smartphones which sadly hasn’t happened. There are limitations to the phone form factor, leading to a poor gameplay experience. Gamers want physical buttons when playing a certain type of game, and touch-based play doesn’t support that.

Panic’s Playdate is a homage to 80s gaming. (Image credit: Panic)

Sure, brands do market some smartphones as “made for gaming” and even offer attachable controllers like the Backbone One and Razer Kishi but the cost of owning them is predominantly high. Asus sells its ROG Phone 6 for Rs 71,999, a high price to pay for a gaming smartphone. In comparison, Nintendo’s Switch OLED, which you can play either portably or connected to your TV, is priced at Rs 32,489 and has an amazing library of exclusive games including The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Animal Crossing: New Horizons as its best selling point. In fact, even Sony’s PlayStation 5, which is a traditional console, costs half the price of a gaming smartphone.

Experts say there is no real differentiation between gaming smartphones and standard smartphones despite tall claims by brands. Lenovo’s recent discontinuation of its Legion gaming smartphones lineup and the collapse of the Chinese gaming phone maker Black Shark tell exactly what’s wrong with the niche space of gaming handsets.

Steam Deck is a Switch-like handheld device that lets you play your Steam games on the go. (Image credit: Valve)

The Switch may be the gold standard in portable gaming but its hardware now appears to be ageing and Nintendo’s close ecosystem limits seasoned gamers to embrace the platform. That opens the possibilities for others to jump in and cater to more mature crowds like PC gamers, console owners and unsatisfied users who bought gaming smartphones thinking it would change the gaming experience but sadly they didn’t. Valve and Asus are hoping to achieve just that with Steam Deck and Ally. Both are bold attempts to make PC gaming more portable, affordable and accessible than ever before.

The return of handheld gaming comes at a time when the industry is heading to a hardware agnostic era, where more than “one device that rules all” it’s the “choice” of the device and “experience” that matters, thanks to features like cross-play and cloud gaming. Subscription services like Xbox GamePass and Apple Arcade are setting the tone of how we play games in the future, where the hardware doesn’t matter as much as it did in the past. What really matters is how a device delivers a unique experience like how Nintendo excelled at motion gaming with Wii or how Panic included the “surprise factor” by designing a nostalgic Playdate console by adding the crank, as it’s one of the most unique ways to play video games on a handheld.