At the EGX video games festival in Birmingham, Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios, took to the stage and essentially confirmed that there will not be a follow-up to the PlayStation Vita handheld console. “The climate is not healthy for now because of the huge dominance of mobile gaming,” he lamented.

But is this true?

When the smartphone started its inexorable rise as a gaming platform, thanks mostly to the launch of the iPhone in 2007, business pundits were leaping over each other to declare the imminent death of the specialist games console. Why would people pay hundreds of pounds for a dedicated games machine if they were effectively carrying one around in their pockets all day? And then the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One arrived, shifting tens of millions of units, selling faster than their predecessors and generally doing okay.

As for the handheld gaming sector, the area of gaming surely most at risk from mobile phones ... well, the Nintendo 3DS has now sold over 50m units, putting it within a whisker of the top ten best-selling games platforms of all time. It hasn’t done as well as the Nintendo DS, of course (150m sales), but then, the DS has been on sale for over a decade and the 3DS has only been out for four years – and it arrived in a very different, much more fragmented and diverse, market place. Unlike Vita, however, it ignored most of its competition – from internet-connected consoles, to smartphones and tablets – and did its own thing.

Doing its own thing is something Nintendo has always understood, and why it has utterly dominated the handheld gaming sector. There were certainly other companies vying for a portion of the market when portable electronic games first started appearing in the late seventies, but it was Nintendo – or more specifically legendary industrial designer Gunpei Yokoi – that realised form factor, price, battery life and cuteness were going to be the defining features of a successful product.

A girl playing a Gameboy during an anti-Iraq War demonstration in London Photograph: Martin Argles

The Game & Watch games were super simple, based on very cheap LCD screens, but they looked lovely, they were sturdy and they were cheap. When the GameBoy arrived in 1989, its monochrome display looked out of step with the wondrous visuals of the 16bit console era, but again, the tech was inexpensive and sturdy, and the games (Tetris, Super Mario Land, et al) exploited the limitations in an entirely loveable way. The combination of portability and kawaii design sensibilities meant that people actively enjoyed taking these things around with them and showing them to others.

Nintendo knew almost instinctively that we would think of miniature games as endearing. There is just something about the reduced form factor that allows us to enjoy child-like experiences without feeling self-conscious. The industrial design legend Donald Norman talks about how humans project a series of expectations onto objects, and how designers need to understand these in order to make successful products. In short: we kind of want small things to be cute – and Nintendo gets that.

But Nintendo’s rivals have usually made the error of thinking that to compete with Nintendo they had to beat it in terms of technology. The Neo Geo Pocket and Bandai Wonderswan totally understood the appeal of cuteness, but they were largely restricted to the Japanese market. In terms of global competitors – from the Sega Game Gear, through the Atari Lynx to the PlayStation Portable and Vita – the philosophy has been “bringing the home console experience to your pocket”. Not only has that proved costly to the consumer in terms of retail price and battery life, it grates against what a lot of people want from a portable experience.

Sometimes, as a race, we allow ourselves to be loveable. It doesn’t happen much and we often have to express it in quite obtuse ways – through novelty socks, or action figure collections, or really liking Pixar movies. Portable games fit into this mode of thinking. The most successful handheld franchises – Pokemon, Animal Crossing, Cooking Mama, Professor Layton – they’re all reasonably complex experiences, but they’re also really, really cute. They fit the form factor – both physically and psychologically.

Animal Crossing – Nintendo has always understood that we equate cute form factors with cute games Photograph: Observer

The PlayStation Portable wasn’t cute. Vita isn’t cute. Both tried to compete, in industrial design terms, with home consoles and with smartphones, dropping into an awkward aesthetic space between the two. When gamers first saw Ridge Racer on the Sony PSP they gasped in wonder – a true console experience on the go – but it turned out that not many people wanted that; not just because PSP was more expensive, but because (to a lot of people) it just felt weird to sit on a bus with this ostentatious piece of cold, sleek gaming technology.

The idea of the Vita as a mini PlayStation 3 or 4 has stifled the creativity of developers. Stunted compromised spin-offs of major console titles like Uncharted and Call of Duty have done very little except underline the differences between a home machine and a portable gadget. They didn’t work. It’s no coincidence that the most successful series on Sony’s handheld machines – Monster Hunter – is very much in the Nintendo mould of highly sociable titles with childlike collection systems.

Monster Hunter has proved one of the most successful brands on PlayStation handhelds because it is social and sharable. This dedicated Gathering Hall was set up for fans in London in 2009 Photograph: PR

Sony has tried to innovate in hardware terms with OLED screens, proprietary memory card formats, proprietary optical discs and strange touch pads underneath the display. But these have usually been ignored by developers and read by consumers as a way to gouge more money from them. The philosophy of the home console race cannot be applied to the portable market because the consumer mindset is totally different. Sony may have had more success if it had really, really pushed the product as a homebase for offbeat experiments and indie projects – there have certainly been plenty of those along the way. But the marketing attention was often elsewhere.

The GameBoy, the DS and the 3DS haven’t just dominated this sector because they got the basics right – battery life, cost and sturdiness – they dominated because Nintendo understands that small things are cute and that cuteness pervades the whole experience. This is exactly what’s going on in the smartphone sector with Candy Crush, Fruit Ninja and Angry Birds. Bringing a game like Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer into work or school is a very specific experience that has nothing to do with technology or gadgetry.

The Vita hasn’t really struggled because of mobile games, it has struggled because people don’t want to hug it.

