RolStoppable said:
Blaming the gen over gen decline of handheld sales on smartphones is the easy way out. There's much more to it.
Nintendo - Overshot the market with stereoscopic 3D and a $250 launch price (66% higher than their previous handheld). No interest in expanding the market, instead focused on pushing Sony out of the market. Nintendo's attempts at retaining their own audience with appropriate software have been half-hearted at times. Software prices have also gone up which is again overshooting the market. Simply put, Nintendo's sales are down, because in its current state the 3DS still can't address large chunks of the market that bought the DS, and because Nintendo doesn't care for market expansion anymore, thus any losses in their existing audience can't be offset by anything else.
Sony - The PSP already got in big trouble in America before the rise of smartphones. The software market collapsed, so it was clear that their strategy wasn't working. The PSV recycled the same strategy, so the outcome is the same; the difference is that nobody buys the PSV for homebrew, emulation and piracy, an important factor that lifted PSP hardware sales after its software market had collapsed. In Europe the market is simply overshot (in America it's too, but lower price alone wouldn't solve the issue there). A cheap handheld that plays casual games like FIFA is what would sell (like the gimped PSP did in the last couple of years), but the Vita is an expensive device. In Japan Sony lacks the third party support, mainly because their first party studios have sat idle for the longest time and shown next to no interest to grow the installed base (which is also a worldwide problem on top of everything else).
Overall, the PSV strategy is an uncoordinated mess that is about flinging stuff at the wall in hopes that something sticks, because apparently nobody at Sony bothered to analyze why the PSP sold as well as it did. They made the PSV and probably assumed that it would sell because it is a PlayStation.
The bottom line is that both, Nintendo and Sony, were poised to see declines, because they've lost sight of what the handheld market demands and needs. I hope that Nintendo never takes the easy way out and says: "Smartphones, duh. Nothing we can do about it. We made no mistakes with the 3DS."
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