It's relatively easy to turn the tide when there's a market with no real competition. It's a lot harder when you start at a ridiculous price point with very successful competition around.

That's a difficult question.

I'm gonna go PS3, though, because the 3DS had very little competition besides the PSP for a long period of time. That price cut before the Vita was even launched was huge. On the other hand, the PS3 was against a cheaper system that had a year's head start, not to mention all the exclusives that Microsoft paid for.

What if the Vita launched first and got the first price cut? Who knows where we'd be at right now.

The competition is that almost everyone has a smartphone in their pocket that can already play video games, granted not the same quality.   PS3's biggest issue was the price.  I knew plenty of people that wanted one at launch but it was way to steep of a drop. 

It's hard to say.    It's not like the PSP really set the world on fire either, but when it was doing well is when alot of cool new games were out like Patapon and a whole bunch of cool japanese stuff.   I have a hard time seeing the Vita beating the 3DS even if it launched 1st just because of how huge the gap between the two is now, but who knows.

Really looking at the PS3 at launch: 599 U.S. dollars and a year after its competition. Then there was the issue with the cell. Developers hated it and games looked worse than they did on the 360.

Publishers gave little 3rd party support and lazy ports were such a problem that Jack Tretton became annoyed at the situation: "If the games don’t look good on the platform, consumers aren’t going to buy them. As I said, we can’t control what third parties are going to do... At some point, what’s the point of porting it over to another platform if it is not going to look as good on a platform that is more expensive? Why waste any money in development doing that"

And he was right. Having a game look significantly worse on a more expensive platform reflected poorly on the PS3.

As a result of that: many titles, especially the smaller games, were released exclusively on Xbox 360 or on PS2 so there was a major drought of games for the platform also. Games that were touted as system sellers flopped either financially or critically (or both).

The 3ds' main problem was that price was too high. They lowered it and that was it. PS3 had a ton more issues.

3DS was bound to turn around eventually, there was never any doubt. The bad start was literally just that--a bad start. The PS3 seemed poised to fail for several reasons, but Sony made quite the impressive push and it turned around.

Still thinking. Now, the PS3 did have an amazing turn around but people are forgetting this: http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=24567

It was the XBOX 360 that most never expected to sell well. The PS3 had a shitty start but people still expected greatness.

Seriously. The 3DS struggled for a couple of months and was fixed after a single 80$ price cut. The PS3 struggled for YEARS and took a 100$ cut in each of it's first 2 years and major third party releases.

3DS didn't have a book written about it's failures, so PS3 wins by default.

Ps3... 3ds went from being the average selling handheld to the only selling handheld of this Generation.. Ps3 went from doomed to "tis shitz haz teh bezt gamez" machine