| curl-6 said: It's sorta similar to what happened with Sony in the 8th gen, when PS4 thrived but the Vita fell flat. |
GC was great, and a simple "hack" in the market made by a newcomer in the presidency of Nintendo, like Satoru Iwata was, made the Gamecube hardware not selling anything in 2006... to sold 100 million units (as the Wii), being already 6 years old in 2006... All caused by the simple excuse of the "new" wiimote (a new controller they planned originally for the GC, during its late years. They had launched the "wiimote" for the GC in 2006... even 2005, and they would have sold NOTHING and nobody would remember that gimmick. Like the microphone for the GC in that Odama game, the very same era).
Basically GC was a fantastic machine, but launched little too late just when PS2 started to sell well after 2 years, hadn't DVD player when in 2001 started to be a must have, and the 3D GTA series was appearing just in the end of 2001 and 2002... but not for GC. Every important detail... went wrong. Some were bad decisions and some were very bad luck.
So, the PS2 sells killed the GC in its most delicate moment, during its infancy. GC had a nice launch title games, though, including the exclusive and IN-CRE-DI-BLE Star Wars Rogue Leader (those graphics seemed not from a new, but from 2 generations beyond PSX/N64). But after the first xmas, stalled. In Europe not even that, because appered in May 2002: By then? far too late to compete with PS2 and GTA series that year.
BUT... The Vita fail, was much more strange.
What I can clearly remember as a predicted disaster, some time before Vita, was the PSP Go. Was even more disaster that the one I was expecting. You can't just launch a digital only portable, in 2009, and expect to sell it well. To whom? PSP had basically a younger user base, people who bought games in the game stores, with physical money. People liked to buy physical games, and their internet connections were not that good to download in a moment various GBytes every time they wanted to play a game they erased from the console memory. That was the wrong horse since day 1.
BUT Vita failure (and a big one), is much more obscure. Very strange. And I don't know what happened there... Perhaps the same Sony (or part of it) boycotted that product. And i mean... on purpose. Of course, this is just a vague supposition, i have NO proof of anything, and if that was true... the reasons would be very obscure and behind the doors of that company.
But I was incredible surprised when SCEA fired Jack Treatton in 2014, just in that Vita era. Well, he officially "resigned"... but you know how those things are when you are the CEO of a big company... (and btw, Tretton was the CEO and also the President of SCEA). Some time after that, Tretton told somewhere he really wanted to promote Vita but inside Sony... didn't. Who exactly? Don't know. But apparently it ended to cost him its position. And Tretton was a VERY historical figure in SCEA: He came during the first era of the PSX, when basically SCE was funded. He was not just an "another guy", he was present during all SCEA (Playstation) history in USA, and of course, knew many people in the industry... and the industry itself as none other.
Anyways, Sony, some time after, also explicitly announced they stopped to make games for the Vita... much before its commercial death. That was another strange situation I never understood. Who does that? I can't remember Sony doing that before, neither. If a console sells bad, just... retire it from the market. All was very very rare with Vita. And they even told "the problem with Vita... was people not wanting to play portable games anymore". Just when the tablets and smartphone games were exploding as ultra popular, and just before Nintendo decided to go full for that portable market with the new Switch (its most succesful console, actually). And now... Sony tries to promote its PS Portal as a great success...? when is selling worse than Vita and is just not even a real portable console? What?
Don't know, maybe all that conspiracy is just my imagination, but... I always thought it was something not explained behind Vita's fail, And Sony has a long-known history of doing dark maneuvers inside its own studios (at least), so... who knows.
Last edited by JohnVG - on 04 January 2025
