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It’s hard to envisage a future in which handheld consoles remain relevant, EA COO Peter Moore has argued.
"We were supportive of both of those platforms," Moore told Games Industry. "But then you’ve got finite resources and you’ve got teams that say, ‘We really think that two or three years from now, these are the platforms that people are going to be consuming games on.’ And you look at the quality of what you can do on phones and tablets…
Sometimes strategy is not about what you do but what you don’t do, and you have to make some hard calls when you’ve got only so many people. To my point, we’ve got to be planning for FY 17 and 18. Do you think the Vita and 3DS are going to be around in some shape or fashion by then on a scale level?"
With 3DS tracking behind DS and Vita managing a mere fraction of the sales of its predecessor the PSP, this scepticism is understandable.
Moore is more optimistic about the prospects of dedicated home games hardware which, lest we forget, many were predicting would go the same way as portable games hardware prior to the launch of PS4 and Xbox One.
"The last time we looked, we were up 127 per cent on hardware vs the previous generation, same month after launch," Moore added. "So all indications are it’s been a strong start.
If you remember this time last year, we were sweating whether these things would fly, right? And to both Sony and Microsoft’s credit coming out of E3 last year, I think they convinced us all they would, and now they’re certainly proving it."
