Part of the reason is that, as the barrier to entry for good hardware has dropped, the ability to incorporate tech features has been opened up to smaller games designers, rather than being something only affordable to companies expecting sales in the hundreds of thousands of units.
Hardware sales dropped 38%, much more than sales of the games themselves, off 29%.
Android is the dominant mobile platform and the cost of quality hardware has dropped.
Sales of games, and especially game hardware, have dropped sharply due to the recession despite the industry's good track record during previous downturns.
According to the industry tracking analyst group, Nintendo moved 196,000 units between the console's launch on November 11 and the end of the month – a number that comes as year-over-year hardware spending dropped 35-percent.
Of all the features and hardware that dropped at Google's event earlier this month, one that felt particularly glossed over was Playground, the new augmented reality mode that's arrived on the Pixel 3 camera.
In a small meeting with journalists at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today, Google's senior vice president for hardware Rick Osterloh dropped a little bit of news: It looks like the Pixel laptop — Google's premium Chromebook and the original product bearing the Pixel name — has hit the end of the line after just two iterations.
Apple has a track record of eliminating or revising elements of its hardware, from dropping the optical disk drive on laptops to changing the docking port on its phones.
Nonetheless, Meitu has seen its hardware revenues drop as smartphone shipments slow in China and competition heats up.
As their hardware prices drop (and you can bet that the Wii will sink below $150 at some point), the Wii could eventually find itself competing with other low-cost streaming devices like the Roku 2 series.
