Is the Vita truely dead?

[Chark]

HappySqurriel said:

 Even if the PS-Vita's hardware is profitable, on the whole Sony is losing a ton of money on it right now ...

Back in 2001 Nintendo and Microsoft both claimed to have a $500 Million marketing budget for the first year of their console's lives; which sounds like a lot of money until you consider that this is spread over 3 regions and over 12 months, working out to being about $20 million per region per month, and 1 30 second television advertisement in primetime costs over $1 Million. I haven't seen any reference to it but I suspect Sony is spending at least $500 Million to market the PS-Vita in 2012, and this would be about $100 per system they will have sold that they need to recover.

Beyond this there is the money that Sony has spent developing games, and the sales of most of their games today would indicate that the vast majority of their released games have lost a lot of money.

 

For console manufacturers the costs are so high that you have to sell a significant number of systems each resulting in enough game sales for the licensing fees to be high enough to compensate. At 2.5 Million units Sony has to be bleeding money at the moment.

No Sony announced a $50 million marketing plan for Vita this year. There is no reason to believe that Sony is loosing money on the Vita, sure they aren't hitting the projections they originally apsired to but the system itself is an outlet of profit. Killing the system off now is a sure fire way to lose money on it, they will never have an opportunity to make enough money back from its development. It is outrageously a bad decision.

The system's manufacturing costs will go down, they will place in price drops when the are reasonable. The system isn't making them a ton of cash but it isn't bleeding money. They need to keep everything that makes them money right now. The idea that it is failing or that it is dead is subjective because it is often weighed against competitors or past devices. PSP sold 9 million its first year, suffered from rampant pirating, and didn't have many online offerings at all. Vita might not be selling well, but it is a concrete system thusfar with EVERY title available digitally and a much more upgradable OS. Where is the line in the sand? How many devices does it need to sell? Vita will be a far more profitable venture than the PSP, Sony only needs to stand their ground during this PR onslaught.