Portable consoles are the future of gaming

In 1989, a long history in the gaming era, Nintendo released a three-and-a-half-minute commercial for its new console. A child screams angrily because he has to stop playing games so the family can leave on vacation; The car sags and its frame deflates as his father shoves a giant CRT TV into the back seat. “The secret to Nintendo’s success is bringing arcade games into the home,” says the cheerful narrator. “Getting her out of the house is another story.”

And then, the big reveal: Game Boy! The gaming system you can take with you. Next comes a song that I would classify somewhere within the realm of “uninhibited music.” SNL “Sketch” narrates our Game Boy director going to the lake, on a date, to the movie theater, a baseball diamond, an airplane, and more.

The song is terrible, the ad is amazing, and the point here is that the people who make gaming consoles have understood for decades that the best console is the one you can have with you. That required huge compromises, though: handheld consoles were clumsy and underpowered; They needed their own toys; And they were always at least a few generations behind the best home gaming systems.

There have been few moments in gaming history where the industry thought it had solved this problem. When PlayStation launched the PSP and Nintendo dropped the first DS, nearly 20 years ago, both companies made big promises about the wireless revolution and how it could change gaming. After that, everyone spent the next decade or so preoccupied with the advent of smartphones and still treated their handheld consoles like entirely different devices.

But it’s different now. Thanks to devices like the Nintendo Switch (which Nintendo has positioned as the conclusion to a decades-long journey to make the perfect do-it-all gaming device) and Valve’s Steam Deck (the best combination of power and portability yet), there’s now proof of a market where you can get a console. The controller does everything well and makes almost no compromises.

For this episode of vertcastthe first in our three-episode series on the state and future of gaming, featuring two of our friends ribbed And find out why this is the time for mobile gaming to really take over. It’s a story about hardware and the fact that the smartphone revolution has finally made it possible to create a very powerful mobile device. It’s also about cloud gaming, app store taxes, and the changing nature of gaming itself.

Suddenly the portable gaming industry was booming with innovation. The Switch and Steam Deck are still excellent devices, but Asus, Ayaneo, Logitech and others have their own paths as dedicated portable systems. Analogue controllers are very good, and usually out of stock; Anbernic, Retroid, and others build popular simulators; And even your phone is quickly becoming a more serious gaming device. There will always be gamers who want more, better, and faster gaming experiences, and PCs and consoles will always be dedicated to them. But most gamers will be perfectly happy with the device in their hands.

You can take him to the lake! That’s the future of gaming, right there.