Does anyone know if there's demographic data available for the DS/3DS and PSP/Vita?
Anyway, just from using my common sense, Vita has a fundamentally flawed strategy. The "casual" market in general is probably not going to buy a handheld gaming device. If you only need to kill a few minutes, or even an hour, you have way more choices in occupying yourself, than you did a decade or two ago with smart phones. It's not necessarily even a matter of smart phone game apps. Even if you took those away, you have the internet with all of it's content. I mean, think of how much time you can sink with Facebook.
So people that just want to kill time are out, and that shrinks the handheld market a lot.
So you essentially have to focus and go after a very specific market with a high need for a handheld gaming device. The Gameboy's target segment is perfect, since they have a high need for the device (do you guys remember how boring it was to sit in the car or how boring fractions were?) and they probably won't own a smartphone (and still a smartphone isn't an ideal way to kills hours of time, over and over again).
Vita's going after a specific segment too, "hardcore" gamers, but it's just too small. I also just don't find the need as well. Some, if not many, "hardcore" gamers are probably sitting around in their homes a lot. Even if a "hardcore" gamer does step outside of their homes, is it enough to really warrant an expensive handheld device, or can they easily kill that time with a smartphone? And if they just absolutely need to have "next generation" gaming on the go, some of them may have gotten a laptop anyway. When you take away all of these people, from an already small segment, it's just not enough.
