Are you saying every single 3DS player is a "hardcore gamer"?
Cuz they most certainly aren't.
Lots of kids get handhelds given to them.
You can divide the market in anyway you want to. If you're thinking of 360º no scope, when I mention
hardcore gamers, then i clarify that has nothing to do with my reasoning.
In my examples:
I use the term "
hardcore gamer" to describe active gamers who look for a better gaming experience, and are therefore, proprietary handheld buyers, such as the Nintendo 3DS or the Playstation Vita.
I use the term "
casual gamers" to describe people who like to game, but are not going to go through the effort of wasting money on a 3DS or Vita, and that's if they even know those exist. So, they settle for what games are available on the platforms they know best and use on their everyday lives: their smarphones and tablets.
As such, a person that
purchased the Nintendo 3DS as you mentioned, obviously has not only knowledge of it, possibly from their past, but that person also actively wasted money on a proprietary handheld, when there are
far cheaper alternatives. So we can assume, that at the very least, they know what they just bought.
Whether a child gets a 3DS or a Vita given to them, is completely
irrelevant for sale numbers and the survival of the handheld industry, unless the kids bought the system themselves. So it's safe to assume, either the parents knew of the existence of 3DS's and bought their children a 3DS system, or the child knew of it's existence and requested a 3DS to his/her parents.
You seem to have something against my arguments, but you've failed to not only explain what you are against, but you also seem to have difficulty understanding what I mean. But if we are bringing children into the subject, then I think this clarifies things:
Most parents today, do
NOT buy their children 3DS's or PS Vitas. They buy them
tablets. Most of the kids on my neighborhood, haven't even seen a 3DS their whole lives. When they want to game, they game on their tablets, where there are not only plenty of games,
but most are also free. And that's the new standard, ever since 2010, and it works just fine for parents.
Parent's (or at the very least, most of them), are not going to buy their kids proprietary gaming handhelds at 200$ a piece, plus 40$ for every game they want, when there's the App Store and the Play Store. And that's assuming parents know what a 3DS is. Most nowadays would laugh their butts off if you told them that there are new "GameBoys" for sale and that they cost 200$ each. Or 100$. Or even 80$. There's
FREE alternatives.
So what is actually holding the market, is
not the children as it once was in the "GameBoy" age. No.
It is actually the adults. Fact of the matter, is that big names such as Pokemon, are alive due to the now grown up kids that they started with. We, buy those games. We buy those 3DS's and Vita's.
I have yet to see a
single child, play Pokemon Go. Everyone that play's it, are within my age range, and sometimes even older.
And why would a child play Pokemon Go? They don't know what the hell a Pokemon is, they
did not grow up watching the whole Pokemon anime and craze with the Gameboy. They grew up with Smartphones and Tablets.
We did not have that alternative. All we had was what
Nintendo,
Sony and
Sega produced on their proprietary gaming systems. There were no free games back then. The only choice we had, was to beg
our parents for the new Pokemon Red and hope for a "yes".