This smells like moneyhatting -- from Nintendo of all people.

Mike from Morgantown

The Vita's only profitable "right off the bat" because they removed all on-board flash memory and sell "seperate" memory sticks at a high cost.  The Vita might as well cost $289, since you basically need a 4gb to be able to download things.

And the GameCube did fine, in the end.  It was a profitable business for Nintendo, with the only exception being early 2003 before the price drop to $99 and the it brieft stopped selling.  Nintendo made tons of money selling Double Dash, SSB Melee and Mario Sunshine six years from launch at $30 a pop.  Like Halo did for Xbox.

But until 3DS gets to a point in Japan where it's regularly selling 150k a week, it's not going to come close to DS's install base.  3DS peaks around 60-70k except for the holidays, and that's not going to be enough to take it to 150 million lifetime sales.

It's just business as usual for DS, Vic, those are both price drops

QFE. (I'm kind of like Capcom.) XD

Yeah, I agree with that graph, DS is unreachable. But the type of dominance PS2 had over GC is not, and to me it's happening, even worse, in fact.

Yes, but why are you even looking to a different source when we have the ds right here?

Just look at the graph 3ds and ds look to be on the same path. Why compare 3ds to ps2, when you can easily compare 3ds to ds? PSP did fine in the same market with the DS. Why should I think it's destined to do terribly now? Because you made an analogy?

It's been 3 months for Japan. We've barely heard anything. e3 is in 2 months, and so is persona 4: the golden, and dragon's crown (vanillaware). While I agree that Sony isn't doing a good job promoting or supporting their console, it's still really really early

With most big developers having their own cross-platform middleware, it becomes not whether a company can port, but all about the moneyhatting. The monster hunter and resident evil games for the 3DS were made with the same mobile architect that umvc3 used for the vita, so it can be done.

Nintendo has a history of money hatting monster hunter to get its new hardware off the ground at Sony's expense, but Sony ended up getting its monster hunter anyway, this time around will be no different.

I'm not predicting the future - well I am lol, but not to that point!

I always say this: [If things continue like that until MH4 gets released on 3DS] it'll be over for vita. Of course things can change, and I believe, just like I said the first post I wrote in this thread, that Sony will do the possible and the impossible to change it, it won't abandon Vita whatsoever, it's a major system for them and they're commited. But to take something out of this sales zone, one of the worst ever for a console, is a very hard thing to do.

That's why, contrary to many (actully just Rol) I'm fairly certain there'll be a Vita MH announcement soon, it's the obvious first step of this change.

Not to the Japanese it isn't. Japan loves them some Monster Hunter! That is why Sony need it over in Japan, it would bring up HW sales.

Here's this generation's top 10 selling portable games in Japan:

So while Monster Hunter isn't the top dog in Japan... it still was a franchise that kept Sony's portable in the fight, even against the incredible onslaught of the DS phenomenon.

PSP's next two biggest selling games?

What's crazy is that the PSP has no other million seller in Japan. Every single title that hit a million for the PlayStation Portable came from the Monster Hunter franchise. So it's quite an important franchise for Sony.

What's scary is thinking about a portable system with 2D Mario, Pokemon, Brain Training, Animal Crossing, Mario Kart, and Monster Hunter in its roster. The 3DS has some crazy sales potential, that's for sure.