Handheld gaming is the future — again

25:27The Switch was not a blazingly powerful system when it launched, and it allowed Nintendo to sell it at a profit. And I think you're going to see a lot of companies these days sell these things at a good profit. Not Steam Deck. My understanding is they lose some money there, but they also own the library. So it comes back around. Actually, tell me about all of the ones that you find on Amazon because I have been looking into all of these and it kind of reminds me of like the smartphone market of say seven or eight years ago when it was very clear that now there's like the parts for this exist in factories in China, right?

26:01And if you want to go buy some of those parts, you can make a phone without trying super hard. And so there was just this rush of companies you've never heard of making phones that all had the exact same specs because those are the ones you can buy from the factory in China. It feels like that's the phase of handheld gaming we're in right now where like there are 600 slightly hard to pronounce versions of what look like about the exact same thing all over Amazon. Are they any good? Are you a pow kitty man or a Ambronick boy, you know? I feel like I can't legally answer that question. Those are a few of the bigger ones, if you can believe it.

26:34Ambronick is one of the biggest of these companies that is making these devices. And I think what's so interesting about these is, unlike, I think, a lot of those phones that you're talking about, these are mostly supported by software that the community is developing and working on. A lot of them are Linux-based or Android-based. But in terms of the actual interfaces and the firmware, a lot of communities are kind of rallying around specific devices. I know the Miu Mini in particular is a very popular iteration. And folks just sort of make open source software to run on these devices. So it is this like really exciting community event that's happening.

27:12It's also created a cottage industry around it because not everybody likes setting up devices and installing custom firmware. So I'm sure if you happen to look on Etsy, you might find versions of these exact same things that have been just slightly tinkered with. And maybe they include all of the emulators or all of the software that Frush is talking about, along with maybe some other stuff that's not so legal. Or perhaps a more legit approach, because we do legal things on this podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I would recommend, there are some great YouTube channels that like specifically dedicate themselves to this group of handhelds.

27:52Retro Game Core is an excellent one that I'd highly recommend. But there are a number that do a really good job of covering this space and giving people instructions on how to like do some of this heavy lifting in the firmware. Chris, did you say Etsy, by the way? This is an Etsy phenomenon? Yeah. They're not sending you like knitted covers for them. They're actually like, but you get Linux. etsy is so much bigger and weirder than anybody imagined it reminds me of um pinterest too where people are like i think i know what that is and then you like realize half of pinterest is people with guns and you're like wait what i will say i looked at listings on etsy for replacement triggers for the miu mini handheld that i use and someone had 3d printed a new design for the triggers that's how esoteric it gets on there it's pretty amazing that's awesome Okay.

28:43Yeah. Who knew? Etsy. Not just for buying coffee tables that barely work in my house. Okay. My next theory, and this is one I'm torn about more than any of the others, which is that the handheld gaming revolution is also the cloud gaming revolution. And I remain torn on whether I believe cloud gaming is like the future or not. And I'm very curious to know what you guys think about this. I think you could be right if handheld gaming continues to look how it does right now. Which is to say, you get a Steam Deck and you can play 90-95 % of what you want on that device. But the brand new stuff, the real cutting edge heavy ray tracing stuff like Alan Wake 2, that's not going to work on it.

29:35You're still going to need a really nice PC or PS5 to make that work. In those games, if you must play them now and you don't want to buy that, if you can play that on cloud, I think that's it. But I think cloud for the foreseeable future, and I'm curious what Fresh thinks here, but I think cloud is a nice-to-have. It is a supplement to most of your stuff being powered by the actual hardware itself. Wait, that's really interesting. So, Fresh, I am curious what you think, too. but Chris, you just said the opposite of the argument that I hear from most people, which is that most people, when I talk to them about cloud gaming, they're like, well, the people who play the most intense games and worry the most about things like controller lag, like the people who go on our battle stations for fun, like those people, those people are never going to want cloud gaming because they want something that is local, that is theirs, that is offline, like with the minimal lag and their wired mouse and all that stuff.

30:30But for the more like casual user, cloud gaming is the answer. But you just kind of said the opposite. No, I think Plant agrees with you because I think the more casual user isn't going to have the hardware that can run Alan Wake 2 with ray tracing and everything. But they want to play the game because it's a great narrative experience, whatever. So this is the solution. The hardcore, they have the 4090 card. They have the hardware to run those games. So they don't need to worry about it. it is the people that like don't want to bother uh getting that system together david i think what is changing is what the idea of the casual user is somebody who plays pc games just in general that can be the casual user now right so like i think um somebody having the steam deck who's like yeah playing some pretty hardcore stuff what would be hardcore in our childhood now is just somebody who's used to watching these people stream since the day there were five yeah to go back to like whether i think it's there yet i think it's actually surprisingly close but there is an element of like the closer you get the further it feels away because there is still lag there are still dropouts and if anyone like cares about playing a platforming game or a shooter or anything that revolves around timing it just doesn't feel as good as playing a locally installed game.

31:51These Nintendo games that are made within an inch of their lives to feel awesome every second of the way can never necessarily get there, at least where the systems are at right now with cloud, because there will always be a slightly tactile delay there that will make it feel a little worse. But I do think, knowing technology, that it can get there to the point where the delay will be so small as to be indistinguishable from playing a game locally. In the same way that I I play with wireless controllers all the time. An eSports person can't stand playing with wireless controllers because they feel that 10 millisecond delay.

32:28But like I think for most people, it's totally fine. I think we will get to that point with cloud gaming. I agree. And I agree that it feels like we're very close, but it might still be a long time until we get there. In the same way that it felt like we would never cross the uncanny valley in video games until we just did one day. And there was a good decade where like we're never going to get this right. Like human eyes are just going to look awful. Faces are always going to look weird. It's going to be uncomfortable looking at characters in video games. And then suddenly you just weren't talking about that anymore.

33:00You know, I mean, unless it was a Bethesda game. But otherwise you were like, yeah, it just looks nice and good. Sure, why not? I think that'll happen with cloud gaming. And that's again why I say it'll start out supplemental. And then at some point it'll just be second nature. Yeah, I mean, right now it is supplemental. So you can play whatever Catan or any turn based strategy game and it's perfectly fine. Like I've played games like that. It's great. But yeah, anything with timing is kind of miserable. Do you think that's tied to handhelds as a thing? Because I think that the case for those two things growing together is essentially that over time you wouldn't need something that looks and feels like the Steam Deck, which is I mean, it's a big thing.

33:43You could essentially just have anything with a screen and two controllers becomes this like ultra powerful gaming machine. I mean, Logitech made a dedicated cloud handheld. Right. That is their entire focus with that device is cloud gaming. I have to say, I don't see a ton of those things in the wild. Well, right. And the problem is, again, the cloud gaming infrastructure is not there yet. So people don't necessarily want that yet. I do think you're right. In a few years, when the lag becomes minimal, you can run it on a$50 hand. Like the fact that you could run Alan Wake 2 on a$50 handheld gaming system is possible thanks to cloud gaming.

34:18We're just not there yet. I do wonder if, ironically, power is getting so cheap, a lot of the games that people play don't even use that much power, that we are getting to a point where maybe, you know, a few years from now, Steam or Valve releases a$150 Steam Deck that has internal power and can still play the vast majority of what you want. and like by the time we actually get to you know cloud gaming working we actually won't need cloud gaming yeah i mean like our phones do ray tracing now like it's we're getting there really fast yeah i'd much rather play resident evil 4 remake just directly on my phone than i've tried playing resident evil 4 oh my gosh i played all of resident evil village on stadia i was the person AMA.

35:10And let me tell you, it was a journey. I'm very happy to never do that again. They were like, why is anyone still using our services? And it's just Chris Plant throwing his controller at the screen. They saw that final achievement on lock and they're like, wait, what? Somebody on the IP must be doing it. No. OK, I think you're right. And I think that also dovetails into my next theory, which is about app stores. One person I talked to made the case to me that Apple and Google could have essentially won the next generation of gaming. They won part of that generation of gaming, but because of the way that they governed their app stores, making companies that wanted to have game libraries allow list each game and list each game separately and pay this huge tax on a difficult margin business to be in with, that not only did those companies prevent themselves from being hugely powerful players in the gaming industry.

36:04They actually inspired this whole new run of hardware because instead of saying, we're gonna build great games for the very powerful mobile device you already have, they're saying, we have to build a new kind of device to play this kind of game because we can't literally afford to play by the App Store rules. And I find that fascinating. And I kind of think it's true that I think a lot of these companies are showing up saying, rather than just try to compete with all of the amazing games that are already on your phone. We're out here saying we can give you games that you can't otherwise get. And that becomes very compelling in a way that it wouldn't have been if all that stuff was just in the Play Store or the App Store.

36:47Yeah, it's tricky because there are a lot of the reason why a lot of those games didn't show up on those platforms. You're right. There's like a huge cut that they're taking. But I also think there were hardware limitations. you couldn't run Resident Evil 2 remake on a phone when that game came out three or four years ago. Yeah, that's fair. So I think that that is part of it. But you're right. I think there's also an element of like it being a pretty big lift, whether it's a rev share or just a development lift to get devices, to get software onto those devices that is diminishing over time. I know Apple, I think, is course correcting in a lot of ways by making it much easier to port games, both to iPhone and Macs, using their back-end software in a very similar way to the way Steam allowed Proton to run all of these PC games on Linux.

37:38I think they realized that people aren't going to take the time to make platform-specific pieces of software. Apple is not quite there yet. They're still kind of one foot in, one foot out, but I think that is the future. I hear your theory, and I think parts of it are right. I wouldn't say that any of Apple's moves inspired anything, though, because that would require believing that Apple at any point would even make a mild, competent effort to get into this space. I don't think Nintendo was like shaking in its boots that Apple was going to get into the making good games business. I think that they were very concerned about the free games, shovelware.

38:21I think that was a legitimate concern. But, I mean, it really is astonishing how they have refused to just put a controller wrapper around an iPhone. You have to use a third party to do that. And that has been for a decade the problem. While they say that, you know, we care about video games. I agree with Fresh in that, yeah, Resident Evil 4 wouldn't have run. But, like, most indie games would have. There is a way to solve this problem. I have to believe it's that they were making so much money, so much money off of the type of mobile game apps that they had. They just felt like, hey, we don't even need to think about that.

38:59Like, that's not our problem. And then eventually, you know, life comes at you fast. I think it's also that indies, you're right, like a lot of indie games would have run on iPhone. I think those indies did not want to be in the same storefront as games that were being sold for a dollar or free. that like that's a really tough thing to fight against now apple solve has been apple arcade which allows you to subscribe and obviously you could bundle that all together with a cloud subscription etc and their services revenue has really increased dramatically over the last few years that seems like more of a play but that's a business play that's not like a game development play and i know even though there have been real highlights on the apple arcade list they've also been like very fallow times so it's it kind of is an up and down uh in terms of games you want to play on there okay we're gonna take one more break and then i will get into my last big grand unified theory about the future of handheld gaming and why it's totally gonna win tm we'll be right back support for the show comes from crucible moments a podcast from sequoia capital sometimes the difference between success and failure comes down to one chance encounter, or following a counterintuitive instinct, or ignoring conventional wisdom to make a bold decision.

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41:25All right, we're back. My last theory, all I wrote down for this one is just Nintendo. Because a thing that I have learned, the longer I cover the gaming world and talk to people about it is that everybody kind of wants to be Nintendo all the time. And Nintendo proved this thing can work. Like the Switch is very good. And I think in a lot of ways, accomplished a thing that no one else has accomplished before where it made a thing that is genuinely excellent as both a TV console and a portable console. And I think it has been theoretically possible to do some of that in some ways in the past but the switch just like did it and i kind of think because nintendo did it and did it well that's just out of the bag now right like i think that is now the bar that everybody is going to have to figure out some way to clear if you want to make a mainstream console i will i will go a step further i'll go many steps further i think there are four futures for handheld okay ready nintendo is a video game console that is also portable valve or in all its competitors are pcs that are portable then there's the emulator machines which are like novelty toys and then there's the last one which i think xbox is trying to corner this market i think people see game pass as its main influence i don't think that's true xbox what it really wants to be is kindle it wants to be the we're not going to win any of these we've we we don't see ourselves as the winner we see us as the thing that's everywhere you go we want to be on every screen that you have i think all of those are like valuable and interesting approaches to it i think the mistake that people will make which you said is like yeah everybody sees nintendo and says i want to do nintendo is that you don't realize no i need to do something different Nintendo nailed that.

43:20They're owning that right now. Valve so far seems to have like really nailed the PC gaming. I think Xbox is making a pretty competent play at whatever its thing is. I think that's honestly what a lot of the whole Sony versus Xbox versus world governments was actually about is the fear of that. So I agree. But I think Nintendo is just one pillar of this handheld first feature that you described. So I think I agree, except I think the gaming PC that's also portable and video game console that's also portable are more closely going to resemble one another over time. I think they already do. Really, the biggest difference between a Steam Deck and a Switch is just power.

44:03Yeah. There are so many games that run on both Steam Deck and Switch. Now, obviously, I know what plant's going to say. Chris just stopped mid-drink of water to disagree with that. Yeah, it was almost a spit take. It was almost great. You can fully mod the games on a Steam Deck. You can add whatever your own software. You can change the whole experience if you want. Plant says I'm totally off base with these guesses on what he was going to say. Here's a better way of putting it. You're right. I made a mistake. If Steam Deck is the PC console, Nintendo is, is Nintendo. The reason you buy the Switch, the reason Nintendo will always be dominant, is because Mario, Metroid, Zelda, Pikmin, Smash Bros., Mario Kart, all of those games.

44:48Nintendo has, throughout the vast majority of its history, long before it was making video games, saw itself as a toy company. And I believe it still does. And I think that is its secret power, is that it makes interesting, fun things. It doesn't get too bogged down by the rest of it. And I would add to that Nintendo, interestingly enough, is losing the one differentiator they had outside of their exclusive software. Because when the Nintendo Switch launched, it was the only game in town from a handheld high-end gaming perspective. And that is no longer the case. so when we go to the switch 2 they kind of have to rely on we have these exclusive titles once again which was really their strategy for like the gamecube which kind of struggled the wii u which kind of struggled uh so it is not like smooth sailing necessarily although they do have this huge install base and now a huge library so like they're in much better position but it is a much more interesting competitive generation that we're stepping into i totally agree with that except it's called the super switch that part's very important what if they call it the super we oh god wait super super we go because like we go outside to play the whoo there we go okay we're almost done here we're almost we should be long done yeah but we're almost done i have two more questions for you and then then we're gonna get out of here two more things i've been thinking about okay one is if handhelds are the thing if the next version of the like mainstream console that most people buy for Christmas every year is a handheld thing.

46:24And I increasingly believe it's going to be. Where are Sony and Xbox in this? Why do you have and do we have any sense of what the hell these two companies are doing? David, do you know that Sony has a new handheld? I do. It's called the portal. Okay, okay, okay. That's good. I wasn't like testing your research. I was actually more testing. Is Sony this bad at getting it promoted? I literally I don't count the portal because it is an accessory to the PS5. Correct. It doesn't count. It's a fancy controller to the PS5. And I actually think there's a really interesting world down the road in like a cloud gaming world where the controller becomes the console in a way that I think is very exciting and possibly very cool.

47:03That's not happening anytime soon. What I don't understand sincerely at this point is why neither Sony nor the Xbox team at Microsoft seems more invested in this space. I think I have an answer. Okay. And it's different for both. I think for Microsoft, it's because historically they have seen themselves as a software company. They have a surface team. I don't buy that argument at all. No, I'm saying historically. Okay, sure. Historically, fine. But sure. I think that comes with like a lot of baggage. And I would say for Sony, the irony is they make so much hardware. Of like every, like right, you're going to get your headphones and your hair dryer.

47:38I remember there was Sony released a 3D TV that you could play video games on and it was like a Sony PlayStation 3D TV and if you put on your 3D glasses you could actually have two people use full screen at the same time because 3D was projecting the dual image, right? Very neat. I had that meeting. The next day I went to another meeting with Sony and saw a 3D TV for video games that you could play games on with two glasses it was two separate teams making the same product and i think that is a real challenge for sony when they think about going out and making this is they have so many teams with different goals that i imagine it could be quite difficult to get the vita 2 through which is a shame because they came so close the vita is i think fresh and i both like it was maybe our favorite video game console until the steam deck until the switch the switch took it over but yeah and then the steam deck took it took that over here's my prediction and this is not based on anything i but i think it would be cool playstation has a tendency actually all consoles have a tendency to when the generation the console generation comes to an end they release like a little mini version of that console because the hardware is super super cheap by then and they put that out there and that becomes like you know oh you buy that as a gift on christmas for 150 bucks whatever at the end of the let's say playstation 5 generation when that hardware is super cheap throw that hardware into a little handheld promise that every ps5 game and everything before it will run on this handheld that seems like a strategy that i would totally get behind give me xbox series s mobile right now it's not that far off in terms of size like it's 50 smaller and you're kind of there yeah and and and again that runs into exactly what we're talking about with like there will still be some games that won't run which is true for s versus series x which is still just the worst naming convention yeah it's awful i have really come to a point where like the more i've gotten into this the more i've come to see it is basically like there's like four versions of how to play games now right there's like the mega intense custom pc build like gaming PCs is one area.

49:59There's like the Xbox PlayStation consoles. There's the people who play games on their smartphones. And then there's gaming handhelds. And if those are like, it's sort of crude, but that is like the four categories I've come to think of. Does that make sense? Am I missing any in the landscape there? Sounds pretty comprehensive. Nice. Okay. My theory is what happens in the next 10 years is that those four things basically coalesce into two. I think the like the consoles go up towards the PCs where it's like we're going to have there's always going to be a market for people who want these super, super high settings on Alan Wake 2 stuff.

50:34Those people are going to be increasingly well served by increasingly amazing hardware. And then I think the sort of casual user of consoles, the handheld consoles and the mobile games all get sort of smushed together in this thing you can hold in your hand or dock to your television world. And I think that's where most people are going to live in the next 10 years. That's my big theory. That's where I've landed at the end of all of this. I totally agree with that. I think you're 100 % accurate. I don't think there's going to be a ton of games that will be made exclusively for the high-end market that you were just telling.

51:08I think we will continue to see all these games eventually, whether it's at launch or six months after or a year after, trickle down to that more casual group. But I totally see that becoming the majority only one trick to it that i i don't know how this plays out i think the laptop is the destroyer of the of worlds of like mediums i think the laptop is like what got music piracy like really going teenagers having a laptop in their room they could like dig into it without being on the family computer right i think the laptop used to have a dvd player and got people really accustomed to watching movies on their laptop and then that made a natural transition into streaming which has led to all of these issues right and i think the kind of like weirdly end game it feels like these always play out in a similar way is the laptop is the is truly the one device that does it all even more so than your phone and i just wonder what that is for games like will games follow that trend is that going to be cloud gaming right it is always like a little weird that you can play games better on your phone than on your MacBook Air or MacBook Pro.

52:20But I'm just curious. I truly don't have an answer, but I do think it's valuable to look at like historical precedent and wonder, what is the thing I'm missing? It feels like there's something there that we've yet to see yet. And I think that's what Google Stadia was trying to get at. They really liked the idea that you would be watching a streamer and then you would just open a browser tab and start playing with them. But, you know, so much for that. Yeah. Well, and, and if, again, if the world we're headed to, like Frush was saying earlier, is this one where you have a screen and a control mechanism and games are games and you can, you can kind of get at them with any screen and any control mechanism you have in front of you.

52:56The experience might change slightly. The settings might change slightly, but like the game is the game. Then ultimately it doesn't, it doesn't even necessarily have to break down once you sit down at your laptop. That is not the world we live in now. My like hottest take ever is I think Stadia was like right about the way the world should be and wrong about the way the world is. And I like wish Stadia had worked with every fiber of my being, but it was also never going to, but that's neither here nor there. We'll cover that some other day. Turns out there's a difference between a philosophy and belief system in an actual business, but yeah, small thing.

53:28This is why they don't let me run Google, Chris. No comment. All right. We need to get out of here. Thank you both for doing this. This was very fun. We have two more of these episodes to do. We're going to come back next week and we're going to talk about emulating and preserving gaming, which has sent me down rabbit holes. I still don't understand. So we're going to sort through all of that together. But for now, thank you both. This was super fun.

53:51All right, that's it for the Vergecast today. Thanks again to Chris and Russ. And thank you as always for listening. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, favorite mobile games, old consoles you want to sell me or anything else, You can always email us at vergecast at the verge.com or call the hotline 866 verge 11. I want to know what you think about handheld gaming and the future of everything. And as always, we're going to try to answer at least one hotline question on the show every week. So keep them coming. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. The verge cast is verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

54:23We'll be back on Wednesday to do a big courtroom catch up. We're going to talk about the SBF trial. We're going to talk about Epic versus Google. We might even talk about U.S. versus Google because, boy, there's a lot of Google stuff going on. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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