| ZhugeEX said: Here is my take on this - http://gearnuke.com/playstation-vita-fail/ |
Very good article.
I think it's pretty clear that the Vita was not going to be a success from the beginning. Sony did not anticipate the market moving to tablets and smart-phones so quickly and taking adults and young adults with it. The Vita's target demographic had simply moved on by the time the Vita was on the market.
It would also seem that handheld spin-offs of AAA home console franchises do little to move the needle, outside the possible exception of GTA. I think the perception there is, 1) that they're just spin-offs and thus non-canon, and 2) they're always going to be an inferior experience to the home console versions. Some people have been trying to say that the big publishers abandoned the Vita because they saw Sony wasn't supporting it but the timing for that does not pan out. Publishers stopped after the first wave of support, while Sony was still releasing first-party content, or else we would have seen a second wave of CoD or Assassin's Creed.
The true draws for handheld consoles appear to be handheld-exclusive franchises that appeal to both children and adults. With the appeal of the devices themselves on a sharp decline, as people already have devices that do a lot more, it's going to be entirely up to the software to attract consumers. Nintendo is positioned to do just that but Sony never developed that type of IP on the PSP and the Vita paid the price. Now, with such a low installed base, even if they did launch new IP that filled that role, it's too late to make much of a difference. The only way I could see that possibly working is if they signed on with a multi-media IP for kids that was already mega-popular--and even then, it would probably be a bad investment for both parties.
