Loke_Thinking about handheld consoles and what would be required for them to make a comeback, and I guess it would be hard to compete with smartphones nowadays.
I think they would have to be cheap. Like, really cheap, to entice people to buy on a whim. Development would have to be way easier, or more streamlined, than typical consoles, so people would make games for it, otherwise nobody would buy it.
Shar(yna)Tran/Shark(aeopteryx)@lokeloski@mastodon.social Another barrier I think is that any games company's "official" handheld would also have to be able to compete with the handheld emulator market, which is pretty robust right now. As you say downthread, Panic did a decent job of this with the Playdate, but they did it knowing it would be a niche market and not trying to compete on a mass level (positive). Only old-school Nintendo thinking comes close and I don't think modern Nintendo has it in the tank anymore, they're chasing numbers.