HappySqurriel said:
If sales doubled and the PS-Vita was able to consistently maintain those sales until the system was almost 7 years old the PS-Vita could break 50 million units; of course that requires 2 pretty gigantic "ifs". And the biggest problem with this as an assumption is that software sales do not support this kind of a recovery ...
Software sales are important because when publishers make money on a project it becomes easy to justify a similar project in the future, and when publishers lose money similar games do not get made. The Wii's low software development costs and relatively high software sales of low budget games meant that it was easy to justify continued development of these kinds of games, and (as a result) there was over 1,000 third party published games released for the system. Even factoring in under-tracked sales, with development and marketing costs the vast majority of third party efforts have probably lost money on the PS-Vita. Consider how Warner Bros. Interactive will look at the $40 Million (to pick a number) they spent developing 4 games for the PS-Vita and the (likely) $5 Million they received in revenues when they're considering producing the next Batman game for the PS-Vita; or Konami who has also released 4 PS-Vita games and (maybe) received $8 million in revenue.
Even Call of Duty, a game where it is understandable why people didn't buy it, will cause Activision to question whether it was wise to produce a PS-Vita version rather than a 3DS version when the 3DS version would (likely) cost less to produce and sell far more units. The answer to this question won't impact software releases in 2013 but it will certainly cause a huge impact in 2014 and beyond.
To simplify this, for every game that is released and sells poorly today (probably) 2 to 4 games will not be released for the PS-Vita in the future; and a price cut that happens 6 months from now will have a much smaller long term effect than a price cut today because of the negative impact of poor software sales on the system's future library.
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Maths? In millions: 4 - 6 - 8 - 8 - 8 - 6 - 4 = 44 million in 7 years and that's topping out at 8 million for only 3 years. PSP was able to jump up to 14 million at one point, a lot can happen in 7 years and PS4's release could be a huge selling point for Vita due to connectivity and that's only one of the reasons Vita could turn around its sales slump.
Software, you mention Warner Brothers. So Mortal Kombat, a port with enhancements and DLC included, sold 110k at an average price of lets say $20 because of price drops. That's $2.2 million and I don't see it going too much higher than that over the years. Now I'm not sure what it costs to port over and add a few features but I'd guess a small staff was able to use available code to muster up the content and in a very short development period.
Lego Batman 2 sold 60k at $30 yielding $1.8 million. This game is widely multiplat and Vita development time is short.
Lego Harry Potter 5-7 sold 30k at $20 yielding $600k. Same as above
Lego Lord of the Rings sold 10k at $40 yielding $400k. Same as above
Without including digital sales WB obtained $5 million in retail revenue for very low development cost(Good guess man). There is no way the aditional cost to release these games on Vita was $40 million though. The brunt of the cost is from making the game but placing it on an additonal device is not costly. Excluding the Vita for these 4 games would have left them with $5 less in revenue for their games.
