Chark said:
Sony's issue at the moment is two fold; Price and Image. Despite the Vita being a versatile multifunction device it isn't being seen as such by the public. It should be a runaway success but in recent years Sony has been the target of competitive consumer groups and the hacker community. The PS3's stepping down from console king this gen in the largest market (USA) has lasting repricussions. Not only have US consumers gone with a competing product by internet mass communication has given a viral voice to camp consumer behavior through outlets like blogs, forums, media article comment sections, facebook, and other social outlets. All of these things are new and/or used in a much higher frequency and number then ever before. So it boils down to a huge PR disaster damaging the brand and there is an active vocal consumer base that has collectively ran a smear campaign for the Vita, as they will for any new product that launces on the market, i.e. Wii U. The price is just a barrier that restricts people from making the jump and buying the system. The more Vitas that get into hands, the more word of mouth and pressence the device will have and that will translate into a consumer understanding of how capable and great the system actually is. (a dedicated gaming app tablet at a fraction of the cost)
As for current software, VGC has some undertracking but as is it has a tie ratio of around 2.0 which is pretty good for a less than 1 year old system with a full digital catalog and untracked sales. I can't wait for some games to get over that 500k mark, and the 1 million mark. Persona 4 golden might be the first if other software can't do it before it launches in Europe. |
If sales doubled and the PS-Vita was able to consistently maintain those sales until the system was almost 7 years old the PS-Vita could break 50 million units; of course that requires 2 pretty gigantic "ifs". And the biggest problem with this as an assumption is that software sales do not support this kind of a recovery ...
Software sales are important because when publishers make money on a project it becomes easy to justify a similar project in the future, and when publishers lose money similar games do not get made. The Wii's low software development costs and relatively high software sales of low budget games meant that it was easy to justify continued development of these kinds of games, and (as a result) there was over 1,000 third party published games released for the system. Even factoring in under-tracked sales, with development and marketing costs the vast majority of third party efforts have probably lost money on the PS-Vita. Consider how Warner Bros. Interactive will look at the $40 Million (to pick a number) they spent developing 4 games for the PS-Vita and the (likely) $5 Million they received in revenues when they're considering producing the next Batman game for the PS-Vita; or Konami who has also released 4 PS-Vita games and (maybe) received $8 million in revenue.
Even Call of Duty, a game where it is understandable why people didn't buy it, will cause Activision to question whether it was wise to produce a PS-Vita version rather than a 3DS version when the 3DS version would (likely) cost less to produce and sell far more units. The answer to this question won't impact software releases in 2013 but it will certainly cause a huge impact in 2014 and beyond.
To simplify this, for every game that is released and sells poorly today (probably) 2 to 4 games will not be released for the PS-Vita in the future; and a price cut that happens 6 months from now will have a much smaller long term effect than a price cut today because of the negative impact of poor software sales on the system's future library.
