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Comment by xboxipadjunkie9 | Hacker News Reader

I hope Nintendo never gives up on the hand-held the-entire-console-in-your-hands experience.

I also hope a larger indie industry of handheld gaming develops.

It seems the imminent doom of advanced hand held devices is cloud gaming, including running consoles at home and streaming to your phone.

It all boils down to what everybody does with their wallets. I miss my GBC.

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I don't see it dieing at all. Hardware just keeps advancing, while hardware requirements are stagnating.

I believe the switch is a big success for 2D indie games (think stardew valley, hades, dead cells). Those game concepts work and good 2D graphics will never look outdated.

I doubt people will buy into anti-consumer streaming-schemes to play great games which could run on a potato.

I highly doubt it. Stadia shutdown, while the Switch and Steam Deck are both a huge success. The latency in cloud gaming and reliability on having a stable network connection are still issues for many people. Not just that, but I don't think most gamers want to pay for another subscription which will always be a thing for cloud gaming and even then you still need some kind of hardware to play on anyway, so why not a good handheld? Even PC manufacturers like Asus are making their own handheld (RoG Ally), Switch 2 and Steam Deck 2 are basically guaranteed. If anything handhelds will just keep getting better and seem to be increasing in market share.

I just hate that Sony killed off the PSP, but I can understand why & it's the same reason for steam deck (and other variants being released that are more powerful) success; games aren't very exclusive anymore and unless you tightly integrate your main console with your handheld (like Nintendo, who went so far as to make them one & the same) then companies will just be creating an unnecessary divide these days.

Think of it as if Nintendo released a home console as well as the Switch; it would wouldn't be a sustainable system at all.

What I find funny is that people praise Nintendo's "genius" for making a handheld that docks to play on TV "so innovative"...meanwhile PSP Go with it's TV dock sitting there like "guys, remember me?" (I love the PSPGo, it's so freaking cute).

Chips are only going to get more powerful and smaller, you can already play a lot of games on a pi, I imagine you'll be able to play the current gen in something similar in a decade.

I've actually been thinking about building a handheld console for my daughter as fun project

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