After all, gaming consoles have not come as far as handheld consoles: think Game Boy to the PSP. We’re almost lost in the future of these portable devices, mobile gaming is on the rise and the tech is ready to come online. What will it become as trends, innovations, paths, push the handheld gaming console into the future? We’ll be covering that here.
1. Evolution’s Handheld Gaming
In terms of the display they’ve gone from the simple monochrome show, to little handheld gaming consoles capable of running high performance games. Both the Nintendo Switch or the Play Station VITA have big industry points in these. Suitable for simplicity of portability, but with home gaming system power: these consoles represent.
a. The Nintendo Switch
Having now raised the bar for what a home console and its hybrid companion handheld should be, and what it can do. It also bent and didn’t give a crap, bringing handheld gaming over to that seamless switch between handheld and docked gaming that on paper shouldn’t be technologically possible.
b. The PlayStation Vita
As an experiment, meanwhile, the PlayStation Vita amounts to less of a failure as an enterprise—more of a transport of console gaming to the go. The problem right now is that we have the past decade’s handheld consoles with extremely powerful hardware and tons of truly great exclusive games that the companies swore we would have.
2. Technology will shape the Future
All of that is poised to change very quickly with new advances in processing power, displays, connectivity and battery life aimed for the future.
a. More Powerful Hardware
I think that the hardware inside handheld gaming console hardware is going to get stronger hardware inside of it than what you’ve got in your home console today. Expanding resolution graphics drastically to slow gameplay will be very inefficient for processors and into GPUs; however, it will make memory capacity significantly higher and will be much more efficient for processors, and into GPUs.
b. Improved Displays
It’s display tech that always improves, so the screens are always better (sharper, more resolution, RGB OLED or AMOLED is so much more common). It shows a bit of the immersive gaming game and you game less stressed on the eyes.
Better Connectivity Options:
We have cloud gaming services like Xbox Cloud Gaming and PlayStation Now becoming more common, why can’t handhelds that feature them? This means games could be streamed to the player’s hand from the cloud, anywhere, with lower latency and tripled games players didn’t need to store locally.
d. Extended Battery Life
The other being the one that has had the battery power from the more ordinary, and more common, handhelds injected in — that are, on the other end of a spectrum, not all that much better. Eventually, batteries in future devices will get better and better, to where those future devices will have better and better batteries, while those older bits of hardware with longer battery lives will keep those batteries alive longer.
3. Mobile games and cloud gaming
A cloud game will happen from the future, when you can play a game by some else’s hands through a handheld console. For instance, if we have what Xbox Cloud Gaming, Nvidia GeForce Now, and Google Stadia’s newest success tells us, you can play video games wherever you have internet, and there’s more for the future.
a. Remote Play and Streaming
Take Remote Play and streaming for instance, since they can already be used on things like the PlayStation Remote Play or Steam Deck. Perhaps these are the start for some future handheld console where fans can carry their whole library around on themselves as opposed to with large local hardware.
This is about 5G Networks and Getting Connected.
For rural cloud gaming and low latency gaming, rolling out 5G network will also help as well. Cloud gaming will continue to grow in viability and appeal as download speeds stabilize on handheld consoles and their connections.
Conclusion
So when the hardware gets better and indie gaming becomes a phenomenal product service, cloud gaming will rise up, sweeping everything out of the door except handheld gaming consoles. Having lots of handhelds that give us a hybrid gaming experience, why do we need a hybrid? For example, the Steam Deck or the Nintendo Switch. So over the coming days and weeks, we’ll be seeing some pretty serious hardware that we’ll use on top of it, and we’ll finally get connected … with some crazy long battery life, maybe even some bit of VR or AR type of integration. Handheld consoles in the future will literally become so portable, so tuner, so useful that they will actually be easier to use than they are today.
