Sony: Vita was designed for a different world, but changes are afoot

[Raven722]

There have been different factors for why the Vita hasn't done so well up to this point. For one, the price. I really don't know anyone who wants to pay what could be considered console prices for a handheld gaming device, regardless of how much tech is packed into it. That was one of the things that kept the 3DS from selling until Nintendo did an $80 price drop about 6 months into its life. That's not even saying anything about the price of the memory cards for the Vita. Holy crap. Even with a $20 price drop across the board those things are still a bit pricey.

Then there is the advertisement. Sony has done about as well advertising the Vita as Nintendo has with the Wii U. Not everything is able to speak for itself or gets word of mouth going. Sometimes you have to seriously promote your own product and from what I've seen it is not getting the marketing attention Sony needs to give it.

Then we have the games. The Vita does need more of them but that's not the real problem. The real problem is a serious lack of high-quality games that are games you can only get on the Vita. Look at Metacritic for the top 20 rated Vita titles. Out of that list, 15 of those are games you can get on some other platform. Persona 4 Golden is awesome but it's an improved port-over of a game that came out 4 years earlier on the PlayStation 2. Sony should have pushed for Dragon's Crown to be a Vita title exclusively. It needs more titles like Gravity Rush and the upcoming Tearaway.

Sony really needs to give the platform its own identity. It's great to bring along familiar franchises like Killzone and LittleBigPlanet, as long as you can do them right on a handheld, but it needs enough of its own franchises so people don't feel like they're paying for nothing more than a handheld version of a PS3. At this point I feel like most of the awesome features of it are wasted because Sony keeps bringing out games that just don't utilize those features or do so in ways that feel forced. It's like they're having games being developed first and then they find ways to fit the features in when they should be building games to take advantage of those features from the start.