Handheld gaming is the future — again

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 [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake-up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 0:32David Pierce?

  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 Frushtick. 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 gonna 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 IONIO and all the things on Amazon, whose names I can't pronounce but seem to be selling very well.

• 1:13David Pierce?

  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.

• 1:34David Pierce?

  Chris Plant, hello.

• 1:35Speaker 02

  Hey, how you doing?

• 1:37David Pierce?

  Russ Frushtick, hello. Hello. Welcome to The Vergecast. It's been a million years since we've had Polygon people on 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.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  I respect that. Sometimes you do need interesting things to talk about, and that's when we show up.

• 1:53David Pierce?

  That sounds about right. And speaking of, so the way that we've set this series up is basically for the next three episodes, we're gonna take on sort of three big things happening in gaming. And the way it's gonna work is that I'm an idiot. That's not like a shtick. That's just largely true, especially when it comes to video games. And you guys are not. So what we're all gonna do is try and sort of answer questions together. And you're essentially going to send me on some adventure and I'm gonna 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?

• 2:25Speaker 03

  Hell yeah.

• 2:26David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 2:26Speaker 02

  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 boops, 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.

• 2:47Speaker 03

  Also, if I need a printer, I know the guy who's gonna get it for me.

• 2:51David Pierce?

  Listen, if you need printers, we've got you.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:53David Pierce?

  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 gonna 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?

• 3:36Speaker 03

  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 handhelds over the years, the Sony PSP, the Sony Vita, which were like beloved,

• 3:48David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 3:48Speaker 03

  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, I mean, it's great, because honestly, it just allows for way more flexibility in terms of gaming.

• 4:08Speaker 02

  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 get 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,

• 4:51Speaker 02

  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 blurrier than ever before.

• 5:11David Pierce?

  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 work of really powerful gaming hardware can happen somewhere else, the recipe should be right here.

• 5:24Speaker 03

  We'll see. Maybe that's something you're gonna look into, but I think we're not quite there yet.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  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.

• 5:42David Pierce?

  Okay. I think that's right. So, okay, I'm still trying to figure out what sort of the big overarching question is here, right? Because on the one hand, you have, how big is this gonna 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 gonna be 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 Steam Deck, which is essentially just trying to be like a gaming PC in your hands. Is that a fair way to define this?

• 6:28Speaker 03

  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 gonna live in from now on?

• 6:44Speaker 02

  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 AAA games, the same year that they come out, onto the iPhone. That raises 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 handheld is the future of gaming, they're the best positioned to take advantage of that.

• 7:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, Resident Evil 4 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 has been a struggle to get people to do that.

• 7:33David Pierce?

  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 gonna change the way that we play games? Or is it just gonna be another way to play Resident Evil? Feels like kind of the big open question here.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think there are comparisons in other pop culture, you know, the shift to people watching movies on their iPhones and Christopher Nolan getting furious. Or the car test when you are mixing pop music and making sure that it works as well on a car radio or like cheap headphones as it would anywhere else. 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 design for it. And yeah, I'm curious what you'll find out.

• 8:28David Pierce?

  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 gonna hate me at the end of this episode, and it's gonna be your fault, Chris.

• 8:39Speaker 03

  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.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, and like, video game purists are like notoriously calm and chill.

• 8:51David Pierce?

  Yeah, it should be fine. Yeah, everything will go fine. Are you guys handheld gamers?

• 8:56Speaker 03

  Almost exclusively.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  We're parents, of course.

• 8:59David Pierce?

  What do you guys play?

• 9:00Speaker 03

  It's usually a Steam Deck since it launched. I know a plant uses the Asus ROG Ally quite a bit, but yeah, I'm a Steam Deck person through and through. Love it.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, and they're interchangeable, in my opinion. 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 framerate is slightly better, but the Steam Deck may be my favorite console of all time.

• 9:24Speaker 03

  But I also use a MiU Mini, which is like a tiny little retro handheld gaming device. So like, it kind of depends on the situation and I think you're gonna find that a lot of people are looking for a lot of different things from handheld gaming these days.

• 9:37David Pierce?

  I like it. Alright, we are gonna take a break and then through the magic of time and editing, I'm gonna go talk to some people. I'm gonna come back with some answers. We're gonna see what we can figure out. Thank you both. We'll be right back.

• 9:51Speaker 00

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Wanna make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake-up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 10:24David Pierce?

  Alright, 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?

• 10:31Speaker 03

  My son is sick, so he's stuck at home and I'm just surviving, so things have been great.

• 10:38Speaker 02

  I'm doing great. I've never felt more alive.

• 10:40David Pierce?

  All right. So you, you sent me off to find out what is the deal with handheld gaming? I have figured out the deal with handheld gaming.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  Yeah?

• 10:47David Pierce?

  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.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  I already have so many questions. I'm excited.

• 11:12David Pierce?

  I have what I have developed into David's five grand theories of handheld gaming's supremacy and victory. That's, that's the official, technical term.

• 11:19Speaker 02

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 11:20David Pierce?

  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.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  You know what's funny about that? I swear that when I went to the very first PlayStation Vita press event, 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 anywhere, but I am positive that I remember this. And now that you say this, that like, yes, this has been a dream for a long time, this kind of blurring of the lines makes a lot of sense.

• 12:34David Pierce?

  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.

• 12:50Speaker 03

  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.

• 12:57David Pierce?

  So this is actually what I was gonna 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 hand, and then they just died. And you guys have been paying attention to this a lot longer than I have. Like, what happened to that generation of handheld gaming?

• 13:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it ran through the 3DS. You had the DS and the 3DS, which both did quite well, incredibly well.

• 13:22David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 13:22Speaker 03

  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.

• 13:48Speaker 02

  I agree with Frush. I think it definitely is partly that Nintendo has always found 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 threw a wrench in it, temporarily?

• 14:07David Pierce?

  I think that's right.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  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, Frush, I think we were at this together at a game developers conference, where, I think it was Satoru Iwata from Nintendo, went on stage and was like, can people please stop making 99 cent games? Like, this actually is not good for the industry. And at the time, everybody was like, ugh, 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.

• 14:47Speaker 03

  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 even more money out of people.

• 15:00David Pierce?

  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

• 15:44David Pierce?

  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'd like a 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. Like, 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 like, it's just sitting there now. Like, you can now make these if you want to.

• 16:21Speaker 03

  And I think the fact that people are making games that run on not only the handheld system, but also the console system, and it's the same game. They haven't changed one iota. The fact that I can play Elden 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 that are discreetly made for each individual platform. So yeah, it's a big change.

• 16:49David Pierce?

  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 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.

• 17:22Speaker 03

  Oh, man, sorry.

• 17:24David Pierce?

  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 like you look like 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?

• 18:02Speaker 03

  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'll work on just about everything.

• 18:18David Pierce?

  Chris, you made a face like you might hate this idea.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  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 there 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 never been true. And once you blow that thought up, then that is when the games that were on mobile, the like kind of like quote casual games

• 19:03Speaker 02

  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 discreet places. I remember an event back in the DS days where Nintendo had Brain Age or something and they Through like high tea for it.

• 19:22David Pierce?

  Nice.

• 19:22Speaker 02

  Nice, but like they were, they were very transparent, like who they thought was

• 19:27David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  The audience for this game and who they thought wasn't. And when in reality, everybody liked Brain Age.

• 19:32David Pierce?

  Yeah. Do that for Call of Duty next time. That's the

• 19:35Speaker 02

  Hell yeah.

• 19:35David Pierce?

  Give me high tea for Call of Duty and we'll, 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.

• 20:20David Pierce?

  That's where like the online communities are moving. So it makes sense to me that all of this stuff is just sort of tentacleding out into everything with a screen and a chip in it.

• 20:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't think this is, it's solely just a realization that yeah, the, 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

• 20:45David Pierce?

  Right.

• 20:46Speaker 03

  The hardware was not going to handle it. So the fact that we've caught up and also the fact that we've diminished 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.

• 21:12David Pierce?

  Yeah, I was listening back to old interviews with Reggie Filzeme 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. And 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, you know, 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.

• 21:46Speaker 03

  What's really exciting is your library stays with you. Like Steam obviously has had a consistent library. God willing, Nintendo is finally gonna like, you know, they've promised that they're gonna 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.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  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.

• 22:18David Pierce?

  If they call it the Switch 2 and don't let you keep your library, that is the most like outrageous user hostile thing imaginable.

• 22:25Speaker 02

  Also, they need to call it the Super Switch.

• 22:27David Pierce?

  Oh, that's good.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  In the same way that they should have called the Wii the Super Wii instead of the Wii U, just like go back to that classic Nintendo convention.

• 22:35David Pierce?

  I was so with you until you said Super Wii.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  Super Wii.

• 22:38David Pierce?

  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. We're just, 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'm, 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.

• 23:22David Pierce?

  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 Razer 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.

• 23:54Speaker 03

  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, Razer 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

• 24:36Speaker 03

  really the 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.

• 24:56David Pierce?

  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 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?

• 25:34Speaker 02

  Are you a Pao Kitty Man or an Amber Nick Boy? You know?

• 25:40David Pierce?

  I feel like I can't legally answer that question.

• 25:43Speaker 03

  Those are a few of the bigger ones, if you can believe it. Abernicke 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 MIUI 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.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  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 Rush is talking about, along with maybe some other stuff that's not so legal.

• 26:52Speaker 03

  Or perhaps a more legit approach, because we do legal things on this podcast.

• 26:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 26:57Speaker 03

  I would recommend, there are some great YouTube channels that specifically dedicate themselves to this group of handhelds. Retro 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 do some of this heavy lifting in the firmware.

• 27:16David Pierce?

  Chris, did you say Etsy, by the way? This is an Etsy phenomenon?

• 27:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:19David Pierce?

  They're not sending you knitted covers for them? They're actually like, but you get Linux?

• 27:25Speaker 02

  Etsy is so much bigger and weirder than anybody imagines. It reminds me of Pinterest, too, where people are like, I think I know what that is. And then you realize half of Pinterest is people with guns. And you're like, wait, what?

• 27:38Speaker 03

  I will say, I looked at listings on Etsy for replacement triggers for the MIUI 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.

• 27:53David Pierce?

  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'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.

• 28:22Speaker 02

  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. That 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

• 29:05Speaker 02

  is a nice to have, it is a supplement to most of your stuff being powered by the actual hardware itself.

• 29:14David Pierce?

  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, 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, that 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.

• 29:49Speaker 03

  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 40/90 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.

• 30:15Speaker 02

  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 a 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 they were five.

• 30:39Speaker 03

  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 with 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.

• 31:20Speaker 03

  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 esports person can't stand playing with wireless controllers because they feel that 10 millisecond delay. But like, I think for most people, it's totally fine. I think we will get to that point with cloud gaming.

• 31:44Speaker 02

  I agree, and I agree that it feels like we're very close, but it might still be a long time till 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 gonna get this right. Like, human eyes are just gonna look awful, faces are always gonna look weird, it's gonna be uncomfortable looking at characters in 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'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.

• 32:27Speaker 03

  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 kinda miserable.

• 32:40David Pierce?

  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.

• 33:00Speaker 03

  I mean, Logitech made a dedicated cloud handheld.

• 33:04David Pierce?

  Right.

• 33:04Speaker 03

  That is their entire focus with that device, is cloud gaming.

• 33:08David Pierce?

  I have to say, I don't see a ton of those things in the wild.

• 33:10Speaker 03

  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 handheld. Like, the fact that you could run Alan Wake 2 on a $50 handheld gaming system is possible, thanks to cloud gaming, we're just not there yet.

• 33:31Speaker 02

  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.

• 34:02David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, like our phones do ray tracing now, like it's, we're, we're getting there really fast.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'd much rather play Resident Evil four remake just directly on my phone than I've tried playing Resident Evil four. Oh my gosh, I played all of Resident Evil Village on Stadia. I was the person AMA. Um, and let me tell you, it was, uh, it was a journey. I'm very happy to never do that again.

• 34:28David Pierce?

  They were like, why is anyone still using our services? And it's just Chris Plant throwing his controller at the screen.

• 34:34Speaker 02

  They saw that final achievement unlock and they're like, wait, what? Somebody on the IP must be doing it.

• 34:38David Pierce?

  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. In a, they, 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 begin with, that not only did those companies prevent themselves from being hugely powerful players in the gaming industry.

• 35:16David Pierce?

  They actually inspired this whole new run of hardware because instead of, 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.

• 35:59Speaker 03

  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.

• 36:15David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's fair.

• 36:16Speaker 03

  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 backend software in a very similar way to the way Steam allowed Proton to run all of these PC games on Linux. I 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.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  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, you know, 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 they have refused to just put a controller

• 37:43Speaker 02

  wrapper around an iPhone, that you have to use a third party to do that. And that that has been for a decade, the problem, while they say that, you know, we care about video games. I agree with Prashen 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. Like, that's not our problem. And then eventually, you know, life comes at you fast.

• 38:15Speaker 03

  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 and or free. That like, that's a really tough thing to fight against. Now, Apple's 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, there've also been like very fallow times. So it's, it kind of is an up and down in terms of games you want to play on there.

• 39:01David Pierce?

  Okay, we're going to 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 going to win. TM, we'll be right back.

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• 39:49David Pierce?

  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 as 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,

• 40:32David Pierce?

  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.

• 40:41Speaker 02

  I will, I will go a step further. I'll go many steps further. I think there are four futures for handheld.

• 40:50David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  Ready? Nintendo is a video game console that is also portable. Valve, or N L, 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.

• 41:33Speaker 02

  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. 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, is the fear of that. So I agree, but I think Nintendo is just one pillar of this handheld first future that you described.

• 42:11David Pierce?

  So I, 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.

• 42:21Speaker 03

  I think they already do. Really, the biggest difference between a Steam Deck and a Switch is just power.

• 42:27David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 42:27Speaker 03

  There are so many games that run on both Steam Deck and Switch. Now, obviously, I know what Plant's gonna say.

• 42:33David Pierce?

  Chris just stopped mid-drink of water to disagree with that.

• 42:36Speaker 03

  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 gonna say.

• 42:51Speaker 02

  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, 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.

• 43:30Speaker 03

  And I would, 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 a much better position. But it is a much more interesting, competitive generation that we're stepping into.

• 44:13David Pierce?

  I totally agree with that, except it's called the Super Switch. That part's very important.

• 44:16Speaker 02

  What if they called the Super Wii?

• 44:18Speaker 03

  Oh god.

• 44:19Speaker 02

  Wait, Super, Super Wii Go? Because like, we go outside to play the...

• 44:26David Pierce?

  Hmm. There we go. Okay, we're almost done here.

• 44:29Speaker 03

  We're almost?

• 44:30David Pierce?

  We should be long done.

• 44:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:32David Pierce?

  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.

• 44:37Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 44:37David Pierce?

  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, 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?

• 44:57Speaker 02

  David, do you know that Sony has a new handheld?

• 45:01David Pierce?

  I do, it's called the Portal.

• 45:02Speaker 02

  Okay, okay, okay, that's good. He knows. I wasn't like testing your research, I was actually more testing, is Sony this bad at getting it promoted?

• 45:11David Pierce?

  I literally, I don't count the Portal because it is an accessory to the PS5.

• 45:15Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 45:15David Pierce?

  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.

• 45:38Speaker 02

  I think I have an answer.

• 45:40David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 45:40Speaker 02

  And it's different for both. I think for Microsoft, it's because historically they have seen themselves as a software company.

• 45:46David Pierce?

  They have a Surface team, I don't buy that argument at all.

• 45:48Speaker 02

  No, I'm saying, I'm saying historically.

• 45:50David Pierce?

  Okay, sure, historically, fine.

• 45:51Speaker 02

  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 gonna get your headphones and your hairdryer. 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 protecting 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.

• 46:33Speaker 02

  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. Was maybe our favorite video game console until the Steam Deck?

• 47:03Speaker 03

  Until the Switch. The Switch, I think, 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 game and everything before it will run on this handheld. That seems like a strategy that I would totally get behind.

• 47:46Speaker 02

  Give me Xbox Series S mobile right now.

• 47:50Speaker 03

  It's not that far off in terms of its size. Like it's 50% smaller and you're kind of there.

• 47:55Speaker 02

  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.

• 48:05David Pierce?

  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. 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 landscape there?

• 48:39Speaker 03

  Sounds pretty comprehensive.

• 48:41David Pierce?

  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 gonna have, there's always going to be a market for people who want these super, super high settings on Alan 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.

• 49:21Speaker 03

  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 of 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.

• 49:44Speaker 02

  Only one trick to it that I don't know how this plays out. I think the laptop is the destroyer of the world, of like mediums. I think the laptop is like what got music piracy like really going. Teenagers having a laptop in their room and 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 in-game, it 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.

• 50:28Speaker 02

  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.

• 51:07David Pierce?

  Yeah. Well, and again, if the world were 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 hottest take ever is I think Stadia was right about the way the world should be and wrong about the way the world is. And I 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.

• 51:45Speaker 02

  Turns out there's a difference between a philosophy and belief system and an actual business.

• 51:50David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 51:51Speaker 02

  Small thing.

• 51:51David Pierce?

  This is why they don't let me run Google, Chris.

• 51:53Speaker 02

  No comment.

• 51:54David Pierce?

  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.

• 52:15David Pierce?

  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 [email protected] 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 Moreno 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 US versus Google because, boy, there's a lot of Google stuff going on. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

• 53:09Speaker 04

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