Nem said:
Personally, i agree with most views here that the Vita needs to have its own "exclusive"games like the 3DS does, that differenciation in the software is key for sucess, but the way the system is designed and marketed, just like the PSP before it is the biggest mistake SONY has made. Home console on the move does not work. The development costs are too high to risk making Vita exclusive titles. Therefore, like the PSP before it, the Vita will only achieve sucess in its final years when development costs lower. As someone who is interested in getting a PS4, i would much rather SONY quit the portable business with the Vita because if they allocate their resources to saving the Vita at this point, its the PS4 that is gonna go under. The vita should never have been released and Sony would've done better business just keeping the support on the PSP and releasing a new model/functionalities that stopped piracy on the system. Seriously, the PSP is dirty cheap and has a vast libraby of titles already, and in itself is not too much weaker than the 3DS and had a headstart of several million units sold. SONY had-has the winner on their hands and they prefer to go for the failure. |
Vita destroying the 3DS is quite an outlandish idea, I see them having really minimally overlapping markets.
I tried PSV, I found it hugely better than PSP (controls are far better, it didn't give me hand cramps with fast paced games, and the screen is gorgeous), but I wouldn't buy it at the current price and I agree that it will sell better later. As I wrote in another post, if we look at what happened on PSP, Monster Hunter won't come until the user base is quite bigger than now, most probably not before Q4 2013.
Anyhow, as soon as HW+SW cease losing money overall and start recovering investments, since then it makes sense to not ditch it, even recovering part of the investment would be better than losing it all.
PS4 itself, even if sold at a profit since the start, will have to recoup an initial investment. and this applies to EVERY device, once it's launched, investments have already been done, so it makes sense to ditch a product only if keeping it on the market would increase losses, but it's not the case of consoles and portables (unless they die horribly never reaching HW economies of scale and a sufficient SW attach rate), where electronics costs decrease quite quickly and there are SW royalties to help reaching profitability.
BTW Sony already stated it several times, in its last balance sheets too, displays and TVs, exchange rates and tsunami are the things that caused the losses of the division including consoles and games too, while the PS brand suffered from decreased profits, not losses.
I totally agree with you, though, that with Ninty killing DS to help 3DS taking off, Sony lost a precious opportunity to market better PSP and make it a late gen huge winner.
Anyway, we are interested in games and mainly focus on them, but while with PS3, PSP and PSV Sony committed mistakes that can be at least partially remedied later, what really almost killed it was letting itself be left behind in the Walkman and TV markets, losing the leadership those products had in the past in some market segments or even in their whole respective markets. While Sony TVs used to be very successful, but never the absolute leaders, the Walkman used to be what the iPod is now, but Sony let it slip behind and inexorably fade away. With its TVs doom Sony suffered from huge losses, but with the Walkman's decline maybe it was even worst, as it lost absolute leadership where profit margins, keeping the brand trendy, could have been huge on huge sales and revenues. TVs losses can be remedied in a way or the other, at worst ceding them when the Bravia brand, despite a shadow of what Trinitron was in CRT era, is still worth something, but with the Walkman, losing a leadership and source of profit and giving it to a competitor by letting its own brand become irrelevant is just a thing that's not controllable anymore. And this takes us back to the PlayStation brand: Sony will better do its best to avoid it ends up like the Walkman, and never again cede anything to competitors for free. It resisted to MS' most powerful attack on home consoles (actually thanks to Ninty thwarting it at the same time it was getting back the leadership with Wii), it arrived to grab more than 30% market on portables, it just must not cede, competitors won't return the favour.
