While the phrase “console war” tends to conjure up images of, you know, consoles, don’t think the battle between handhelds was any less contentious back in the day. The mid-’00s battle between Sony’s PlayStation Portable and Nintendo’s DS seems pretty one-sided in retrospect, but it certainly didn’t seem that way at the time. Former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden certainly remembers how threatening his company’s entry into the handheld market felt.
“I remember when we showed the first PSP back in – what was that? 2003, ’04, ’05, something like that,” Layden recalls in an interview with The Expansion Pass. “I had a friend who was working at Nintendo, and he sent me a text message saying, ‘You bastards.’ I said, ‘Hey, bro, you know, it’s all fun and games.”
By the time the DS was revealed, Nintendo was the unquestioned king of gaming handhelds. Other portable devices had found some success over the years, but the Game Boy and Game Boy Advance had sold hundreds of millions of units. No other publisher was brave – or foolish – enough to enter that space, even with the DS turning to a radical new direction with its multiple screens and touch interface.
Nintendo would ultimately find success with the DS by reaching out to a wider, more casual gaming market, and by the end of the platform’s life it had already sold over 154 million units. The PSP’s 76 million units sold might seem paltry by comparison, but it’s by far the biggest sales number any non-Nintendo handheld has ever put up. But rampant piracy made it pretty difficult for Sony to actually sell games for the PSP.
“PSP did reasonably well, but then the OS got hacked and you could jailbreak it pretty easily,” Layden admits. The platform’s savior was “a little game called Monster Hunter,” whose co-op focus meant that players across Japan were convincing their friends to pick up their own consoles and copies of the game to join in each others’ hunts.
With rumors of a PS6 handheld heating up, Layden warns that “Sony has always struggled in marketing two platforms at the same time. PS3 was a struggle, but PSP was very successful. Then Vita came out and that was doing well, but then PS3 got itself into a better place. You only have so many marketing dollars and so you’re trying to put them against different products.”
Layden suggests that “if Sony does get in the handheld business again, you might almost set up a different company to do it. That would be their only focus instead of having one marketing budget trying to put it against a handheld and a console and software. It loses its focus.”
That might’ve been true in the PSP and Vita era, when the handhelds were distinct platforms that got different games than their console counterparts, but I’m not sure it remains true today. Successful platforms like Steam Deck and Nintendo Switch are built on the promise that you can take your exact same home gaming experiences on the road with you. In that regard, PSP and Vita might’ve been a little too ahead of their time.
“With Vita, we thought we’re going to bring a console experience into your handheld and you’re going to have this great console game, but [you’re going to] carry it with you. It’s going to be amazing. When we looked back when the smoke cleared, I realized that no, people just want a good handheld experience on their handheld. That’s what they want. They don’t want to replicate a console experience, necessarily.”
In fairness, you can see that borne out in the top played charts for a platform like Steam Deck. You’ll certainly see games that are popular across Steam there – your Witcher 3s and your Diablo 4s – but you’ll see a lot more representation from handheld-friendly experiences like The Binding of Isaac and Balatro than you will on the main Steam charts.
“I think the company needs to really decide what it wants to be before it makes a decision to fire up another platform,” Layden concludes.