Vita's sales is now approaching the level of Dreamcast sales.

[richardhutnik]

Immortal said:

richardhutnik said:

Systems and companies and brands come and go in the videogame business.  If the Vita is going to end up not doing well, be dwarfed by the 3DS, and the PS3 maybe barely break into second, would have to wonder about the strength of "Playstation" as a brand.  I know some go "Playstation FOREVER!" and that is their brand, but the history of the videogame business shows a lot of instability in it.  

I'm sort of arguing against myself here, but Playstation just seems to be too big to fail, so to speak. I mean, the history of video games isn't particularly long, is it? The industry as we know it only really began with the NES. And, since then, Nintendo, Sega, Playstation and Xbox have been pretty much the only major competition. While there were some small fry in the early generations, I don't think they were ever in the same league as these four. Now, if we take these as the four major brands to ever have been in the industry, then only one of them to leave has been Sega. While Sony's financial situation is definitely as bad as anything has ever been, the Playstation brand is still much stronger than Sega was at its worst, in both raw numbers and proportion of the market. As such, I can understand the notion of the PlayStation brand dying off feeling unrealistic.

Names as brands get old and change.  A company may be too successful to leave, but labeling a product as never failing in the market is pushing it.  Even Nintendo doesn't keep the same name for the platform.

I would say that "Playstation" as a name is weakening.  It isn't top dog anywhere now.  And with this, it loses its FUD factor.