To be clear, “mobile” is a distinct category from “handheld”. I am not OP, but to answer your question, I think the idea is that to bridge the gap with mobile gaming the Switch would have to… actually compete in that space. IOW, it has nothing to do with sales. Not many people are considering whether to buy a Switch instead of Candy Crush on their phone. If you ask me how many toasters you have to sell to prove to me you’re in the mobile gaming space, I’d reply that you’re committing a category error. You could sell 1 trillion toasters and still not succeed in “bridging the gap between making toast and mobile gaming”. This is of course a hyperbolic example, and gaming is a gradient with more grey areas and plenty of overlap, but arguably “mobile gaming” in particular is so different from the rest that it is fair to categorize quite differently. There is a good argument that it should if anything instead be compared to gambling from a business model perspective, or social media / content consumption given its expected use environment (on the bus, waiting in line, in bed, etc.).
At the same time this metaphor works in reverse. There wee very much people who don't see the appeal of a 3DS becsuse "I have free games on my phone". And the 3DS lost a lot of its market due to that. Pokemon wasn't enough for the first time in some 20 years. And then Some part of The Pokemon Company released Pokemon Go and it was clear that the lines were blurry. Gaming or non-gaming, I can't find someone who didn't at least tinker with POGO in the few 2 months.
I think it's a bit silly to suggest that there isnt a decent overlap in the market. Any Japanese company has a mobile division, and they all utilize their console IP's there. They wouldn't do that if all their audience were candy crush players.
Exactly. If you ask me, it would have to run the latest triple A games like F1, Call of Duty, FIFA, Elden Ring, Dirt, etc very well and be an attractive platform for that kind of gaming. The FTC is IMHO correct when they see Xbox, Play Station and Windows as one market and Switch in another.
People usually have the latest Play Station or Xbox, not both, but lots of people have a Switch in addition to either.
Right, the switch wouldn't be competing with Mobile Games, it would be competing with Mobile Phones. So, to compete in that space, the Switch would have had to be a mobile phone. Maybe they could have gotten away with being a Tablet.
It's competing for a similar audience. But phones target a wider audience. There are very much high spec phones marketed to play the highest fidelity games, so it's not like there are no console gamers who consider mobile gaming.
What would the Switch have needed to accomplish to bridge the gap to mobile? Sell 1 billion units?