Wow, I actually forgotten I ever posted this .

The point was to debunk the 'notion' that Nintendo has a 'bad track record', meaning it sells significantly lower than other companies (ie. Sony), or currently has a 'low' streak.

A point which is false. Yes, they had two consecutive weak consoles (weak only compared to their biggest direct competitor I might add), three actually, the Virtual Boy was of the same era; the N64 era. That's just because Nintendo made way more hardware than other companies. You're bound to have a bad one some time, Sony is experiencing this now. Does that mean that they now have a bad track record?

Also, taking plain sales number isn't the best way to compare stuff anyway. You'd have to take into account the market share each had and the size of the market as a whole in each respective Gen. Suddenly, the NES > PS2.

Lastly, handheld consoles are just as much consoles as home consoles are. You can't just discard them, as the so called 'bad track record' argument becomes obviously ridiculous because of the stellar handheld sales. Game & Watch also did 43 million (in the early to mid 80's!) acording to Wikipedia.

Anyway, this was the point: debunk the 'notion' that Nintendo has a 'bad track record' .

Assuming it still gets support that far out, I'd say 35-40 million. I wouldn't expect it to do as low as 20 unless it does so badly that retailers just abandon it after a couple of years.

At the same time, the fast moving smartphone and tablet market will make ANY non-Nintendo gaming handheld an iffy proposition at best. Most other handheld devices will be far above the Vita in performance a few years out, and devs will have only refined and expanded their offerings on those devices in that time frame--making the Vita an even harder sell, killer apps or no.

I was looking back at old charts for the PSP in it's first year, and the sales numbers were insane. You had a bunch of random ass games I don't even remember seeing at the time pulling in >500k, and stuff like GTA pulling in ~1m. With the ridiculous cost of the Vita's memory, and the size of full retail releases, there's no way lack of tracking on download sales can account for that difference.

I love my PSP, but I just don't see the Vita getting anywhere near PSP sales, regardless of how good the library gets. The rapid hardware growth in the handheld market means that dedicated handhelds will have to appeal to a smaller and smaller number of hardcore gamers. Especially if it doesn't have Nintendo's stable of software behind it.

PS Vita needs both more games and a more competitive price. By cutting 3DS price early, Ninty actually forced Sony to do the same. My impression is that Sony is just trying to do it later than one year since the launch, for image purpose and to avoid pissing early adopters off too much. Also, a full price 1st Xmas in the West definitely makes sense, there will be discounts and special offers for BF and after Xmas anyway, besides the gifts season itself, to support its sales, so a cut will be useful even after it, surely the Xmas boost will be smaller, but it will help more keeping momentum. But really, we won't be able to tell anything for sure until after Xmas.

Bookmarked for future humiliation.

make it take 6 AA batteries for 2 hours of game play? :D

I'm yet to be convince it will sell above 10m to be honest. I dont see why anyone would buy the system, even after a price cut. Its lost all its third party support for next year.

UPDATE: Current Vita sales: 6,224,289. 13,775,711 to go...

Good prediction!

I still think that will close 20,000,000, but maybe is more realistic 17/18 million.

The Vita is doing better than the Wii U!
VGChartz are undertracking the Vita and they didn't post the TV sales.

Ouch... :P