MichaelH on 03 October 2013
| tilinelson2 said: I don't know why the thread derailed into a discussion whether Vita TV sales should be counted together with Vita sales or not, but whatever is the choice of the chart tracker, it will not make any difference to anyone willing to make a Vita game unless it is heavily based on touch controls. In the end, what matters to the consumer is whether the piece of hardware he / she bought will have enough support and be able to play games they like. As every game developed for Vita TV will work on Vita, if Vita TV sells well enough to convince more and more developers to put their games that work on Vita, we can consider Vita "saved". For Sony too, because if they can profit more and more from the hardware project that generated Vita and Vita TV because of Vita TV, the latter will have "saved" them from an otherwise unprofitable project. Now talking about what I expect from Vita TV, I think it makes a lot of sense when considering Sony's strategy for Vita. I always believed that since the "Indie" push and the marketing as a PS4 companion, Sony needed to be aggressive and sell Vita in the west for less than the 3DS. Vita being more expensive than 3DS only made sense when it was being advertised as a more powerful console capable of running heavier games. As it is not the case anymore, and Sony seems to be pushing for a mid-term between the old traditional handhelds and mobiles, by offering cheaper games with attested quality (indies) and aiming a much higher attach rate than PSP or PS3 for example, they could take more losses for each Vita sold and recoup the losses with the software sold. So, I think pricing Vita at $150 or less would not be crazy. But they did not, and Vita TV comes exactly to fill that void. It is rather cheap ($100), and can be a big success with the audience that doesn't buy traditional consoles because of the big entry price and big price for each game. The Vita-only games would be a plus for that audience (much like Steam were most people buy most of their games during sales, but occasionally shell $30, $40 or even $50 in a bigger game). If this strategy will work in the longer term, only time will tell. It will depend a lot on how Vita TV is advertised and how strong the word-of-mouth can be. But at least this market looks better than the expensive handheld console market Vita was originally envisioned for. |
Thank you! Even though this thread has been completely derailed it is nice to see that someone still has something sensible to contribute..
