The portable gaming market is more crowded than ever, between iPhone, Android and dedicated gaming devices like DS, PSP, 3DS and NGP. However, Sega Europe’s senior vice president of sales Jurgen Post doesn’t see the gaming growth of smartphones coming at the expense of portable consoles.
“Will [dedicated handheld consoles] be as big as they have been in the past I don t know, but I m sure they can all co-exist,” said Post. “One of the key examples from us is Football Manager on the iPhone. We released it last year, and we ve just released a new version. We also released a PSP version. The funny thing is the iPhone version is 4.99 British Pounds and it s selling well, but the PSP version is much more expensive and yet we re doing similar numbers to what we did with previous versions.”
“You would expect that a lot of people would play it on the iPhone and not the PSP, but that s not the case. We released an identical version on iPhone and that s doing huge numbers, but it s not cannibalizing the PSP sales. It shows you can have different worlds next to one another,” he added. “Titles like this really prove that smartphones and dedicated handheld gaming systems can co-exist next to each other.”
Source: MCV {link no longer active}
