Only because they don’t count the Switch as handheld. Nintendo was pretty much the entire handheld market.
I don’t know what would be left by how they lay out the numbers. Switch (2) is console, Steam Deck is PC. The Chinese “boutique” handhelds by Ayaneo, Ayn,… use existing game ecosystems (either PC or Android).
I guess Playdate and whatever Atari sells these days. Can’t think of any other dedicated handheld with its own ecosystem.
Microtransaction-laden cell phone games very infamously oozed in and ate that entire market’s lunch. It turns out for short duration video game adjacent distraction on the go, people would much rather use the device they already have with a “free” (only up front) option rather than pay for a Gameboy/DS/PSP and games to go with it.
Square discovered this the hard way when they tried to release their various Final Fantasy remakes on smartphones in the early days as if they were regular games, i.e. pay $4.99 or whatever and have access to it in theoretical perpetuity and to the nearest decimal point, no one bought any of them. It turns out consumers respond much more positively to downloading a game for “free” and then coughing up several times more in microtransactions over time than buying any given title outright would cost, and/or being incessantly bombarded with ads as they play. Obviously the industry has figured this out and now everything you can play on your cell phone is feemium pay-to-win microtransaction hell built around slot machine mechanics, but it doesn’t matter because it apparently prints money.
![Steam competitors be like. [Extended?]](https://thelemmy.club/pictrs/image/8d2d46eb-234c-41bd-b7c1-fb9c4c9f2508.webp){kind=link}
Damn, handheld virtually nonexistent since 2020
Only because they don’t count the Switch as handheld. Nintendo was pretty much the entire handheld market.
I don’t know what would be left by how they lay out the numbers. Switch (2) is console, Steam Deck is PC. The Chinese “boutique” handhelds by Ayaneo, Ayn,… use existing game ecosystems (either PC or Android).
I guess Playdate and whatever Atari sells these days. Can’t think of any other dedicated handheld with its own ecosystem.
Microtransaction-laden cell phone games very infamously oozed in and ate that entire market’s lunch. It turns out for short duration video game adjacent distraction on the go, people would much rather use the device they already have with a “free” (only up front) option rather than pay for a Gameboy/DS/PSP and games to go with it.
Square discovered this the hard way when they tried to release their various Final Fantasy remakes on smartphones in the early days as if they were regular games, i.e. pay $4.99 or whatever and have access to it in theoretical perpetuity and to the nearest decimal point, no one bought any of them. It turns out consumers respond much more positively to downloading a game for “free” and then coughing up several times more in microtransactions over time than buying any given title outright would cost, and/or being incessantly bombarded with ads as they play. Obviously the industry has figured this out and now everything you can play on your cell phone is feemium pay-to-win microtransaction hell built around slot machine mechanics, but it doesn’t matter because it apparently prints money.