Judging Vita before its first Christmas is "preposterous" - Sony

[ECM]

Chark said:

Kenology said:

Chark said:
@Kowen It hasn't been out a year in Japan yet though. Close, but not yet.

@benao87 They didn't say that the sales were unacceptable, of course they wish they sold more, they've said it several times before already. Summer sales are usually crappy, Vita just especially so.

@blugamer23 There is good reason to believe that the Vita is a profitable hardware, at least break even. Software and accessory sales are adding enough profits to make the console profitable right off the bat, even if the Vita is selling for a small loss which is unlikely given the cost breakdown announced after its release.

@slimebeast Really man? No decency. When the Vita starts selling well, I hope you feel bad about statements like that.

@OP I agree, the thing needs a Christmas. The consumer environment is extremely negative, fueled by competitive BS cultivated in the fans of a certain product/service. Very sad to see that the dawn of the troll can have such an effect on human behavior.

The Vita though, has a lot going for it; games, apps, features. It's amazing, but I think they messed up their launch. The earthquake and flooding delayed it from a holiday release last year worldwide. That probably reduced its launch potential due to the low sales in Japan after launching there, kind of scared the rest of the world from buying the Vita. News coverage was very critical of the system for its Japanese sales. Japan should not have gotten the go ahead on schedule while the rest of the world was delayed. Japan had the weakest regional software lineup and Sony tripped up their sales for the rest of the world that way.

A simultaneous February launch would have had more success, kept higher numbers leading up to the summer and prevented a lot of negative publicity due to low sales. They didn't generate more sales by launching in Japan on time, hell a Golden week launch would have worked more in their favor. Vita has become a cultural target, it's market faith is well shaken and all for immature reasons, but hey, that's how the market is and Sony has made its mistakes. I just wish people were a little bit more decent and educated.

Sure, blame Vita's problems all on message board trolls.  And people in Europe and the Americas don't care if it had low sales in Japan - if the machine was enticing enough they would've purchased it regardless.  The Vita isn't getting it any worse than the Wii did in it's hayday - and that console was a beast.

I think you're being way too melodramatic.  It's really not that hard to figure out why Vita isn't selling and Sony alluded to that in the OP.

Do you not think gaming media has influence on the market? Vita started selling like crap in Japan due to a lack of eastern appealing software and an overabundance of PSP software releases. Once Vita started dropping in sales, this included highlighting sales drops from launch numbers which is obvious, the negative articles started making their rounds all over the media. Gaming sites, electronic sits, business sites, all pointed at Vita long before world wide launch. It cultivated the Vita doom, it was already established before it even got into people's hands.

The forums, the message boards, the blogs. Those aren't just profile pics in a virtual landscape, those are real people spreading hate for the system, consumer loyalty at its worst. It's not just online, those people have friends, those friends have friends. Mass information spreads like a wildfire. When something becomes "in" it is because of perception. Vita is on the wrong end of perception to the extent that the "in" thing is to hate the Vita. It takes time to overcome something like that, people need to stop caring, stop listening to the fanatics, before the Vita will become an option for people. People are prone to social influences.

I'm not saying that is the only factor, of course price and other things serve to dissuade especially since the main competitor dropped their price heavily. Some say its software, but there was plenty of software at launch and it does have a large selection with some big names. I fear that every new console is going to be a victim of this from now on, new hardware won't have the lineup of several year old systems. It seems people are comparing it to that and not to systems during their first year on the market.

Christ, the irony here burns: how many of you using these tired excuses didn't trot these out for the Wii? Oh right, probably because the Wii sold *in spite of* all the insane negativity--negativity at a level the Vita can only dream of--it would have been ludicrous to suggest the media had anything other than a meager impact, and that only with the 'hardcore' tools, a vanishingly small portion of the market that believes it's far more important than it actually is. In fact, it'd be more reasonable to say that the media is *impotent* in this regard or that they have the *opposite* effect on game sales based on observable reality. (I'm going with impotent merely because the "media" caters to a tiny slice of the market, read: people like us.)

(Note: the media shat all over the Wii--still does--and it crushed the HD twins, but you think its valid for the PSV to fall back on that excuse?? That the *media*, which has virtually no thrall over the vast, vast, vast majoirty of consumers is kiilling it? Really?? And that if the media would only go gung-ho over the non-existent library of games it'd start selling in staggering numbers? People aren't (that) stupid: they can see how  much a Vita costs and they can look at the library and see that , hey, I can play a lot of these games on my PS3 so why should  I fork over another $250 to play, basically, the *same* games?? This, btw, is part of the reason you'll *never* see a mainlinel Pokemon on a home console--it sells GB/GBA/DS/3DS' and it would be foolish and reckless to take away one of the biggest selling points the hardware has. Sony doesn't get this. They thought (bizarrely) again that duping the PS3 library, in large part, would move units, but it didn't work on PSP (from PS2), so why did they thnk it'd work on Vita? (Incidentally, this is why people banking on ACIII this holiday to save it are living in a dream world.) But no matter how often history repeats, people will choose blind fealty to their favorite 'x' over reality.)