The Vergecast - Handheld gaming is the future — again

Episode Date: November 6, 2023

In the first episode of our series about the future of gaming, The Verge's David Pierce chats with Polygon's Chris Plante and Russ Frushtick about handheld game consoles. Is this portable, all-in-one form factor where all of gaming is headed?  Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software. Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Thumbsticks. I'm your friend David Pierce, and this is the first in a new mini series of episodes

that we've made all about the future of gaming. We're doing this series, as you might expect, with some of our friends from Polygon, Chris Plant and Russ Frustick. And we're going to talk about some of the biggest open questions and big ideas that we're thinking about in the gaming world in general. It's going to be very fun. This week, for instance, we're talking about handheld gaming.

You know, the switches and the steam decks and the ROG allies and the analog pockets and the IA Neo and all the things on Amazon, whose names I can't pronounce but seem to be selling very well. Basically, the question is, is this portable all-in-one form factor, the future of gaming? Like, is the Game Boy back? That's really all I want to know. I'm going to consult with Chris and Russ, and then I'm going to go out and see if I can find some answers. I'm going to talk to people.

I'm going to do some research, and then I'm going to bring back what I found out and see if they agree about the future of gaming. Let's get into it. Chris Plant, hello. Hey, how you doing? Russ, fresh dick. Hello. Welcome to the Vergecast. It's been a million years since we've had Polygon people in the Vergecast, and it's because we hate your guts.

But I'm very excited to have both of you here. This is very exciting. I respect that. Sometimes you do need interesting things to talk about, and that's when we show us. up. That sounds about right. And speaking up, so the way that we've set this series up is basically for the next three episodes, we're going to take on sort of three big things happening in gaming. And the way it's going to work is that I'm an idiot. That's not like a schick. That's just largely true, especially when it comes to video games. And you guys are not. So what we're all going to do is try

and sort of answer questions together. And you're essentially going to send me on some adventure. And I'm going to have to go figure out what is going on and come back and see if I've learned anything real and true that feels right. Does that make sense to you guys, this work? Hell yeah. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. I will also rebut you're not an idiot.

I wouldn't say that. I would say we know a lot about like the beeps and the boobs, right? We can talk about the Pac-Mans and the Assassin's Creed. You have the brain that tells me how do these things work, right? I feel like if I look at a sheet of code, I say throw it over to the verge. They'll figure it out. Also, if I need a printer, I know the guy who's going to get it for me. Listen, if you need printers, we've got you. Yeah. So the first thing we've decided to talk about, which I think is actually like a perfect crossover of all of our interests, is handheld gaming. This is a thing that I have been sort of rooting for for many years. Like going back to a bunch of years ago, there was this company called Shadow that was like, we're just going to stream a Windows PC so that you can play all of your games on a Windows PC, but it's in the cloud so you can do it anywhere you want. And I was like, that's the best idea ever. And it failed for a bunch of what turned out to be extremely predictable reasons.

Really quick, let's just sort of set the scene on where we are right now. I feel like we talk a lot about the Nintendo Switch. We talk a lot about the Steam Deck. But in this like reboot phase of handheld gaming, how big is this market? Like how much do people actually care about what's happening with handhelds? Well, you mentioned the switch. I mean, that really, I think, rebooted the whole concept of, hey, there's money to be made here. There's been a number of handheld over the years, the Sony PSP, the Sony Vito, which were like beloved, but realistically not very successful.

So the switch proved them, oh, there's actually money here. And Valve followed suit and made their own with the Steam Deck, as you mentioned. And since then, we've seen a number of other companies jump into this space. And there is so much demand for it that, I mean, it's great because honestly, it just allows for way more flexibility in terms of gaming. And then I would say the market is even bigger with all of your mobile games, your smartphones, your iOS devices and Android and tablets. I really sound like a real verge person right now. I can't wait to be shredded for saying your iOS devices. But no, I think there are kind of three phases to what got us here.

One is the iPhone launching and the app store with it. And then that sort of phase of social gaming, there is the end of the Nintendo formula, which was, yeah, the DS and the 3DS, which is where you had to kind of design games for that system. Right. And then the Switch and Steam Deck, what they really changed, I think, and why I think it's really blown up is a lot of what is being designed for PC or Xbox or PlayStation can now also be handheld. So it's not just that like, oh, handheld is blowing up. It's that the line between traditional gaming and handheld is is bluer than ever before. Right. And it seems like if we're also headed into this phase of cloud gaming being the thing and it's like most of the world. of really powerful gaming hardware can happen somewhere else, the recipe should be right here. We'll see.

Maybe that's something you're going to look into, but I think we're not quite there yet. Intense skepticism, but I would say devices are more powerful than ever, that your new iPhone can play, the brand new Resident Evil. Maybe you don't even need the cloud gaming part of it that doesn't work. But we'll get to that. Okay. I think that's right. So, okay, I'm still trying to figure out what's sort of the big overarching question.

is here, right? Because on the one hand, you have, how big is this going to be? Because like you guys said, we've been at this for a while. And I think, I think we have to throw the iPhone out. This is going to be my my hottest take so far is that I think if we talk about mobile phone gaming, you end up just down a completely different road. And it's like, yes, everybody has a mobile phone. Everybody plays games on it. I think we can just like mark that as like done, checked on the checkbox. I want to talk about like gaming specific devices. And that goes all the way down from like the things you have to like emulate old Game Boy games, like the analog pocket, which everyone's obsessed with. And then from there, all the way up to like the seam deck, which is essentially just trying to be like a gaming

PC in your hands. Is that a fair way to define this? I think so. I think the larger question that you're trying to answer is, is this the norm? So when Sony or Microsoft creates their next console, are they making it with handheld gaming in mind, whereas right now they are not? And is this just the future we're going to live in from now on? And that's why I wouldn't rush to throw out. your iPhone on this case because I think that Apple is trying to start to pull these like triplet games the same year that they come out onto the iPhone that raised the question of are they even trying to finally I mean it's a forever question you know I don't want to be Charlie Brown missing the football here but like are they also trying to get into this if if handheld is the

future of gaming they're the best position to take advantage of that yeah resident evil four is not a handheld game. That is like a game that you would play on a PlayStation 5 or an Xbox or a gaming PC. The fact that it's running on an iPhone is crazy. So it is genuinely kind of a new era for mobile games in ways that it was not previously. But you're right. It's it has been a struggle to get people to do that. Okay. All right. So maybe the question I need to go figure out is basically the people who make games and make the hardware to run them. Are they thinking about you holding a device in your hands or is it just another screen on which you can play games, right? Like, is handheld going to change the way that we play games or is it just going to be another way to play Resident Evil? It feels

like kind of the big open question here. Yeah, and I think there are comparisons in other pop culture, you know, they shift to people watching movies on their iPhones and Christopher Nolan getting furious for the car test when you are mixing pop music and making sure that it works with as well on a car radio or like cheap headphones as it would anywhere else. I'm curious, as is it would. I'm curious, is that something people are thinking about when they design games now? Because especially everything from like the text on the screen to having control options, there's a lot that goes into how you designed for it. And yeah, I'm curious what you'll find out.

Yeah. You're just trying to get me to really piss off all the purists. That's what I'm hearing here. Everyone who believes in like the fidelity of the sound and the frame rates is going to hate me at the end of this episode and it's going to be your fault, Chris. Well, it's funny because the purists are playing old Game Boy Color games on their like ancient Game Boy hardware. So, like, they'll be on board.

Yeah, and, like, video game purists are, like, notoriously calm and chill. So, like, it should be fine. Yeah, everything would go fine. Are you guys handheld gamers? Almost exclusively. We're parents, of course. What do you guys play? It's usually a Steam Deck since it launched.

I know a plant uses the AISRog ally quite a bit. But, yeah, I'm a Steam Deck person through and through. Love it. Yeah, and they're interchangeable, in my opinion. And I use the ROG because I'm playing it on a couch and I can have it plugged in. And the resolution is slightly better and the frame rate is slightly better. But the Steam Deck may be my favorite console of all time. But I also use a Miyu Mini, which is like a tiny little retro handheld gaming device.

So it kind of depends on the situation. And I think you're going to find that a lot of people are looking for a lot of different things from handheld gaming these days. I like it. All right. We are going to take a break. And then through the magic of time and editing. I'm going to go talk to some people. I'm going to come back with some answers.

We're going to see what we can figure out. Thank you both. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question. What if, given the right tools, I really put my all into this. One tool that can help grow your sprouting business to new heights is Shopify.

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Go to Shopify.com slash vergecast. That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. All right. Welcome back. It's been a few weeks. We're back in the studio. Chris, Russ, still here. How are your lives? How are things? My son is sick, so he's stuck at home and I'm just surviving. So things have been great. I'm doing great. I've never felt more alive. All right. So you sent me off to find out what is the deal with handheld gaming. I have figured out the deal with handheld gaming. Yeah? This went totally differently than I expected. I have come back absolutely 100% convinced that handheld is the future of gaming. In every meaningful mainstream way, I think this is the answer. I don't know if it's the 25 year answer, but I think the next 10 years of gaming looks like handhelds. Like I really truly earnestly believe that in a way that I did not when I started this process. I already have. have so many questions. I'm excited. I have what I have developed into David's five grand theories of

handheld gaming's supremacy and victory. That's the official technical term. Sure, sure, sure. The first thing I realized in talking to folks about this and going back and doing a bunch of research, I spent a lot of time watching like 20-year-old game console introductions, like E3, 2004, all kinds of good stuff going on at E3, 2004. And I think I think I didn't realize is that this is kind of what the gaming industry has always wanted. Like, there was stuff from the PSP and the early days of the DS that it's like Nintendo and Sony and a lot of these gaming companies have been talking about this idea that you should have something that is powerful and feels like a console, but is not tied to your television

and your couch. Like, they've been talking about this forever in a way that I really did not realize. You know what's funny about that? I swear that when I went to the very first PlayStation Vita press of a very. they showed us a build of the PlayStation Vita with an HDMI out on it. The original premise was like you would be able to actually plug it into your TV

and that just got erased from time. I don't even know if I can find this anymore but I am positive that I remember this and now that you say this that yes, this has been a dream for a long time this kind of blurring in the lines makes a lot of sense. Yeah, this stuff is so much less new than I expected And I will say to some extent, it kind of gives me pause because, like, if you rewind back to 2004, all these people were launching these devices saying, this is the moment for handheld gaming.

And that, nope, it wasn't. But it was in the sense that, like, the DS sold, like, gobs and gobs of units, right? But, like, not on the console side. So this is actually what I was going to ask you guys is there was this moment, right? We had the DS, the PSP, there was this real energy around consoles you could hold in your hands. And then they just died. And you guys been paying attention to this a lot longer than I have. Like, what happened to that generation of handheld gaming?

Yeah, I think it ran through the 3DS. You had the DS of the 3DS, which both did quite well, incredibly well. Yeah. But on the like high end handheld gaming side, both the Vita and the PSP, I think just struggled to like reach a wider audience for whatever reason. Maybe it was because they were going for like more mature games or something like that. There just wasn't, I don't know, maybe the hardware wasn't ready to the point where people wanted to make discrete software for those platforms, whereas Nintendo was like, whatever, our games will run on anything. We can make it happen. I agree with Frush. I think it definitely is partly that Nintendo has always fine selling effectively like graphing calculators and making cash off of it, right? That was the original model of the Game Boy. You know what you're saying of this has been a long time coming, that maybe smartphones

through a wrench in it temporarily? I think that's right. And that we did have this period of, well, maybe mobile gaming is just Farmville, right? Maybe it's these idle games. I mean, I remember, Fras, I think we were at this together at a game developers conference where, I think it was Satoro Oada from Nintendo, went on stage and was like, can people please stop making 99 cent games. This actually is not good for the industry.

And at the time, everybody was like, oh, you know, like here's Nintendo, the old industry coming into the room telling us not to do this anymore. But in hindsight, that kind of proved right in some ways. Yeah, I think free to play ended up taking over that model, but yeah, 100%.

It does diminish, I think, the higher-end products and results in games that are designed for that cheap price point to get, more money out of people. Yeah, I think that's right. I think there's a really interesting version of this story where you could argue that mobile was kind of the great diversion for the gaming industry for a really long time. And it led a lot of people down really profitable, really unpleasant roads that ultimately led to nothing. And like, we got to Farmville and whatever that was. And I mean, even the Sony story, right, they got obsessed with the Experia phones and trying to build gaming

phones and then just trying to build regular phones and kind of got away from what it was doing really well before that. So yeah, I think you guys are right that some combination of the hardware wasn't quite ready and mobile was just sort of ate that thing, which brings me to theory number one, which is that the hardware is ready now. Oh yeah. Which is a huge, huge change. Like I went back and looked at the specs for like the PS4 when it came out. Do you guys remember everybody was talking about it as if it was like a supercomputer? It was like, this is the most powerful. That thing is basically spec like a like mid-level laptop. Like that's, we can do powerful gaming systems now without trying all that hard. The chips are super accessible. You have more and more of these really powerful

chips that are being built with mobile in mind. They care more about battery life. They're much more efficient. They're much cheaper to get. It's there now in a way that it wasn't. And you can build really good games for these platforms in a way that you couldn't before, which I think is a huge, huge change. And it's just sitting there now. Like you can now make these if you want to. And I think the fact that people are making games that run on not only the handheld but also the console system, and it's the same game. They haven't changed one iota. The fact that I can play Eldon Ring on the Steam deck and also on my PS4 and also on my

PS5 makes a huge, huge difference from just like a bandwidth standpoint. There's only so many games that everyone can produce, let alone games they're discreetly made for each individual platform. So yeah, it's a big change. I think that's actually exactly right. And that's one of the things I only realized in talking to folks about this that I had never really realized before is there was this obsession. for so long with like there were console games and then there were handheld games and they were

different and that the way to make these systems work was to build like specific games for these devices and they had to be their own genre. So when anybody stopped doing it because they didn't sell really fast immediately or whatever, they just died, right? It's this like death spiral of nobody cares that leads to these platforms dying. Now it's not the case. And this is actually you you stole David Grand Theory number four from me. Oh man, sorry. It's fine. We're just, we're jumping around here. Theory number four is parody. It's that you can just build a game now and it works everywhere. I found myself talking to a bunch of people who have been building games like this for a long time. You look at a company like EA, right? EA makes console games and it makes

mobile games with the same names, but that are fundamentally totally different games. And that barrier is sort of collapsing, right? Where like, Fortnite and Roblox are functionally the same thing, no matter what screen you play on. And it seems to me that that is much more. the future than tailoring everything to the specific device and controls and console that you're on. Do you guys think that's right? Yeah. Not only is that better for the players. That's also from a business standpoint, way more cost productive.

So there's really no reason that you would ever need, if you needed to, I just think people are going to gravitate towards just making a game that will work on just about everything. Chris, you made a face like you might hate this idea. No, I like this a lot. I think there's like one other piece to all of this in this separation. between mobile and console, which is gender misconceptions in the history of video games. I think that not only were these two different types of games, I think people saw people who play mobile games as women or people who are on Facebook, as quote, you know, mom gamers, and that hardcore console gamers were men. And what I think marketers are realizing

slowly and hopefully exponentially is that not only is that not true. It's not. never been true. And once you blow that thought up, then that is when the games that were on mobile, the kind of like, quote, casual games actually just show up on Xbox, you know, because why not? Why shouldn't they be there? There's an audience for them there. And that's when Call of Duty shows up on your iPhone, that these are not discrete places. I remember an event back in the DS days where Nintendo had brain age or something and they threw like high tea for it. Nice. Nice.

But like they were very transparent, like, who they thought was the audience for this game and who they thought wasn't. And when in reality, everybody liked Brain Age. Yeah. Do that for Call of Duty next time. That's the... Hell yeah. Give me high tea for Call of Duty and we'll be somewhere. No, I think that's right.

And I think the overall collapse of gaming into just being across everything is kind of the thing that underscores all of this for me, right? Is that we're now to a place where gaming was. once a specific thing you did on a specific device in a specific place. And it has just ballooned out to being worlds that you dip in and out of no matter where you are. And it feels like with that comes working on lots of different platforms, lots of different kinds of hardware. Like it's the same thing that's happening with computers, right? It's that instead of being a thing in a room that you sit down at to do a thing, it's just like woven

into your life in these new ways. And that's what the game developers want increasingly, it seems. That's where the money is. That's how you get people to be involved. That's where like the online communities are moving. So it makes sense to me that all of this stuff is just sort of tentacling out into everything with a screen and a chip in it. Yeah, I don't think this is, it's solely just a realization that yeah, the audiences are more or less

the same across everywhere. It's also just a hardware consideration that like you could not have a handheld that could run a console game 10, 15 years ago. We just like physically, the hardware was not going to handle it. So the fact that we've caught up and also the fact that we've, diminish the importance of console generations is a huge impact on this as well. The fact that there are so few PS5 exclusive games or Xbox Series X exclusive games means that you're making games that run on all these different generations, which include

handheld games at this point. So everything is sort of working together to kind of get us there. Yeah, I was listening back to old interviews with Reggie Philzame from Nintendo, and he was talking about one of the challenges for the gaming industry is thinking about like the 10-year horizon of every console generation. It's like anything we do, we have to be able to live with for a decade because that's how this works.

And we are just not in that world anymore. Everything overlaps, things are moving, especially with cloud and sort of this move to digital, it just feels like all of the ideas about what you can run and where and how long you have to support things. That's all just rapidly going out the window, it seems like.

What's really exciting is your library stays with you. like Steam obviously has had a consistent library. God willing, Nintendo is finally going to, like, you know, they've promised that they're going to continue the library for the first time ever on whatever the switch follow-up is. So I think that is a big pusher as well. Yeah, I think that's the funny part that you mentioned Reggie because we still don't know if Nintendo is on board with this. We've heard a lot of promises, but until the Switch 2 is out, I would never bet against Nintendo doing something deeply strange. If they call it the Switch 2 and don't let you keep your library, that is the most outrageous user-hostile thing imaginable. Also, they need to call it the Super Switch.

Oh, that's good. In the same way that they should have called the Wii the Super We instead of the Wii. Just like go back to that classic Nintendo Convince. I was so with you until you said Super Wee. Super Wee. Yeah, no, I think you guys are right and I think that idea is part of what makes me think that handheld is the thing. Because I think if you were to boil it all the way down to something and it's like, what is the single most versatile, version of the hardware here, it's a handheld object, which I think is like why we start

from there going forward, which brings me to thing number, I don't know, two, I've lost track. There's some theories. It doesn't matter, which is just, it's somewhere between like manufacturing and momentum. I couldn't decide which M I wanted to do. But there has been like an explosion of this hardware over the last couple of years in a way that I didn't even realize. Like I own a switch. I have played some steam deck and I was kind of like, there's those two.

and then nothing else of real great consequence. And like, good Lord, was I wrong. There's so much stuff out there. And you have, like, the PC manufacturers are getting super into this because you can, it's essentially just a, like, relatively high-powered PC in a slightly different case. You have all of these new companies like analog coming out of the woodwork to do some of this stuff. You have gaming companies like Razor and Logitech doing all this stuff.

It's like this feels like a hardware category that a lot of folks can get into in really interesting ways, which makes me think it's going to get much bigger than just the, like, game maker companies really, really fast. And it feels like that momentum is already happening. Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, you know, we haven't even dove into the, like, random fly-by-night handheld developers, companies that you might see on like Amazon or whatever. But yeah, the fact that ASUS and Lenovo and, as you mentioned, Razor and Logitech, the fact that they are going hard on this and so quickly, after seeing the, success of the Steam Deck is really just, I think, a huge indicator of where things are going.

I also think it's, they have the luxury of being able to sell older chips in these devices that aren't like cutting, bleeding edge chips because they need to keep the power usage down. So they can use stuff that's like maybe one or two years old, which is really the model that the switch set out. Like the 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. It was very clear that now there's like the parts for this exist in factories in China, right? And 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 an Ambrinick 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. Ambrinick 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 really exciting community event that's happening. It'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. I would recommend there are some great YouTube channels that specifically dedicate themselves

to this group of handhelds. Retro GameCore 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 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 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. Yeah.

Who knew? Etsy, not just for buying coffee tables that barely work in my house. Okay. My next theory. And this is one I am 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 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. You're still going to need a really nice PC or a 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, Frush, 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, like, 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. But 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 Allen 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 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 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 just somebody who's,

used to watching these people stream since the day there are 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. All these 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, like, I play with wireless controllers all the time. An e-sports person, can't stand playing with wireless controllers because they feel that 10 milliseconds delay. But 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 and video games. And then suddenly you just weren't talking about that anymore. You 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 will 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. 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 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. You 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. 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, like the fact that you could run Alway 2 on a $50 handheld gaming system is possible thanks to cloud gaming. We're just not there 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, we're getting there really fast. Yeah. Yeah, I much rather play Resident Evil 4 remake just directly on my phone than I've tried playing Resident Evil for, oh my gosh, I played all of Resident Evil Village on

Stadia. I was the person, AMA. And let me tell you, it was, it was a journey. I'm very happy to never do that again. They were like, why is anyone still using our service? And it's just Chris Plant throwing his controller at the screen. They saw that final achievement on lock. And they were like, wait, what? Somebody on the IP must be doing it. No, okay. 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, like, 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, like, you know, 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,

they actually inspired this whole new run of hardware, because instead of saying we're going to 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. Yeah, 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 together. 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 backend software in a very similar to the way Steam allowed Proton to run all of these PC games on Linux. I think they realize that people aren't going to take the time to make a platform-specific

pieces of software. Apple was 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 like free games, troubleware. I think that was a legitimate concern. But, I mean, it really is astonishing how how they have refused to just put a controller wrapper around an iPhone. That 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 Frushing 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 outs that they had they just felt like hey we don't even need to think about that like 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'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, et cetera,

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 isn't up and down in terms of games you want to play on there. Okay, we're going to take one more break, and then I will get into my last big, grand, unified theory of the future of Handheld Gaming and why it's totally going to win. TM. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Grammarly. You don't need reminding that the world moves fast. But work today requires clear communication, and when every message counts, sounding.

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With Grammarly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com. That's Grammarly.com. All 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 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 and 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 Kendall. It wants to be the, we're not going to win any of these. 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, what 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. They'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 future that you describe.

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 overtime. I think they already do. Really, the biggest difference between a Steam Deck and a Switch is just power. Yeah. 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 add, 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 Brothers, Mario Kart, all of those games. Nintendo has, throughout its, the vast majority of its history, it's 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. 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 We Go. Because, like, we go outside to play the...

Ooh. 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 we're going to 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, like mainstream console that most people buy for Christmas every year is a handheld thing. And I increasingly believe it's going to be, where are Sony and Xbox in this? Why, do you have, 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. That'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.

I remember there was, Sony released a 3D TV that you could play video games on. 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 place games on with two glasses. It was two separate teams making the same product. And I think that is a really, real challenge for a 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, Fras 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 that over. Here's my prediction, and this is not based on anything, 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 gives. 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 again, that runs into exactly what we were 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 got. 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. There'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, 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 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 Allen Wake 2 stuff. Those 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. I 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 don't know how this plays out. I think the laptop is the destroyer of the worlds of 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, endgame, feels like these always play out in a similar way, is the laptop, 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. But 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 Stadium 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 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 kind of get at them with any screen and any control mechanism you have in front of you. The experience might change slightly. The settings might change slightly. But like the game is the game. Then ultimately 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 or there. We'll cover that some other day. Turns out there's a difference between a philosophy and belief system and an actual business. But yeah, small things. This 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 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. All 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 theverge.com Or call the hotline 866 Verge11. 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 Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We'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.