Topic: Multiplatform handheld games?

[tendoboy1984]

Why don't developers make multiplatform handheld games like they do for consoles? PS3/4 and Xbox 360/One share many of the same third party games, but 3DS and Vita have their own unique libraries, with very little multiplatform stuff. Why is that?

[Soren]

Two vastly different platforms to develop, not much sense to do so, at least simultaneously.

[TOPHATANT123]

3DS gets the majority of 3rd party support because it has marketing, however I think if 3DS were more comparable to the Vita's level of power and had a more similar architecture we would see much more multiplat games. The reason Vita games are still being made is that developers would have to sacrifice artistic vision or gameplay to get games to run on the 3DS hardware, on the other hand 3DS software is made because that's the best selling platform and at that point it doesn't need to be on Vita because the sales of the 3DS SKU will eclipse the Vita SKU, same for the DS and PSP.


There are some mulitplatform handheld games though, off the top of my head I can think of GTA China Town Wars, Virtues Last Reward, Samurai Warrior Chronicles 3 and Mr James Jones's game of the year (so far) Conception 2.

[azeke]

Because for a long time there was no MULTIPLE handheld platforms. Nintendo kept virtual monopoly there and it was Gameboy or nothing, GBA or nothing.

Nowadays, Nintendo lost leading place to mobile and is now actively poaching hit-games from there to bring to 3DS. Games like Puzzle & Dragons, Monster Strike and the like.

[nickmitch]

Vita gets a lot of that old-school, downport the console version style of support, if I'm remembering it's line up correctly.  (The big games early on were like Little Big Planet, MLB: The Show, GoW, and Uncharted, right?)

3DS gets more unique titles (DKCR3D, Xenoblade 3D, and Hyrule Warriors 3D notwithstanding) because of the hardware.

Anything not getting ported between the two is probably either a) Nintendo/Sony exclusive or b) not worth the effort of porting.

[Ian Sane]

I think part of it is a cultural thing.  From the NES-to-PS2 time period consoles were mostly a Japanese thing.  We saw Western devs supporting consoles increase during the Xbox's life time and then Western devs pretty much took over last gen.  Multiplatform seems to be the norm for the West.  Note that during the Japanese dominated console era that the companies that were big on multiplatform games were Western ones like EA and Activision.  Japanese publishers like Capcom, Konami and Square stuck mostly to exclusives.  The PS2 has tons of exclusives of Japanese-developed games.  We know they could easily have been ported to the Cube and Xbox but they weren't.  It just wasn't the convention.

Handhelds don't mean **** to Western publishers.  How many notable non-Japanese third party 3DS or Vita games can you name?  Handhelds are Japanese.  Japanese third parties tend to focus more on exclusives so they have no problem making a 3DS-only game.