Is the PS Vita the Concorde of Handhelds? - IGN

[Zlejedi]

HappySqurriel said:

Zlejedi said:

HappySqurriel said:

I'm not surprised that elitests gamers love the technology behind the PS-Vita (I think it is pretty impressive myself) but I think it may end up falling flat within the broader market primarily because it is not designed to take into consideration the needs of the broader market.

Which might actually be a gamble that pays off.

NDS and PSP had total userbase of over 200 milions and tragic attachment ratio or 4-5 games sold per console.

Now if Vita is succesfull among core gamers only and reaches 20-30 milions of userbase but that userbase buys 10-20 games each over the lifetime of machine with let's say 1/3 of game sales coming from digital store at twice the profit of high street sales for publisher that would be very viable market to support with games.

Except that it will never work out that way ...

While they can make it more and more of a "dream machine" to these high end gamers, they probably will not see a significant increase in game sales because (while these high end gamers do buy more games) the high end gamers are more likely to own multiple systems and will be buying/playing games on those systems rather than on the PS-Vita.

Essentially, while there are people who buy 20+ games a year the vast majority of them will own multiple platforms and will be selectively playing the best games available for the PC, XBox 360, PS3, Wii, PS-Vita, iPhone and 3DS; and even though they think the PS-Vita is way better than the 3DS they still won't be buying more than 5 or 6 games a year for it. Even if they do buy more games they're far more likely to be involved in buying/selling used games than the mass-market gamer meaning that Sony doesn't see the benefit from these game sales.

Except you greatly overestimate multi system ownership - people who have pc/ps3/x360/wii and iphone/3ds/psc are rare.

Most will have one-two home systems and maybe one handheld+phone.