While not without value, limiting the analysis strictly to the small handful of games which appear on both platforms strikes me as an incomplete way to view the issue at best. I mean, per this site, the best selling Vita game, first or third party, is under 400k in Japan. No other game has sold more than 270k, and the tenth-best selling title (which is first party) sits at a meager 130k. There are 73 3DS games that have sold more than the #10 Vita seller. I find it extremely difficult to look at this data and conclude that "the Vita, like the PSP before it sees better sales on 3rd party software."

3ds games in March

03/06
Doraemon: Shin Nobita no Daimakyou - Peko to 5-nin no Tankentai
Senran Kagura Burst: Guren no Shoujotachi (Best Collection)

03/13
Penguin no Mondai+ Bakushou! Roulette Battle!!

03/20
Game Center CX: 3-Choume no Arino
Hero Bank
Mario Party: Island Tour

03/27
New Love Plus+

psv games in this month look better i think psv has a chance to outsell 3ds in this month.

How else would you compare? Monster Hunter tips the scale heavily for 3DS, but that's is more of an outlier as a main MH sells well on all platforms. The biggest selling games on 3DS all come from huge franchises that the Vita does not have (Dragon Quest, Puzzles and Dragons, and MH). It's the cream of the crop so to speak. Once you get past that, the two systems are pretty equaliavent on 3rd party Japanese sales.

This stigma exists because the number of announcements + the fact that there are several small/mid level games that have done very well on Vita. The fact that the Vita userbase is 1/7th of the 3DS makes people more surpised at God Eater, Miku, and Senran Kagura.

Why not? Thats like saying I dont understand why anybody releases consoles in the smaller European/South American/Asian markets. Each individual country doesnt sell much but combined they make up a sizeable market and as long as they are making money off each unit sold then there is no reason not to release it there.

360 sold over 1.5 million in Japan, im gonna throw out a random number and say it made an average of $50 profit from each. That would be $75 million plus software/accessory/subscription profits. On the other hand if they havent made any money from releasing it in Japan then I agree with u.

Let's not overstate the matter: there have only been two Monster Hunter games, one P & Z, and two Dragon Quest titles. It takes a long time after those games before the two systems become even remotely equivalent. This is doubly true when the Vita series you've identified have a decent pedigree (God Eater 1: 700k; God Eater Burst: 620k; Three Hatsuna Miku games between 260k and 410k; Senran Kagura has sold on par with the 3DS titles), and that the remainder of the Vita top ten has games like Final Fantasy and Persona in it.

It ain't all David vs. Goliath here. Shoot, Phoenix Wright sold more than all but one Vita game (100k more than the #2 Vita title). Harvest Moon is ahead of all but God Eater and Persona, and only 10k behind Persona at that! I'm just not seeing this alleged parity. Maybe the small developers are pleased to reach 50k Vita sales, but that happens even more often on the 3DS, so...

The only ones I can come up with are: 1) Sony is actively courting small developers to work on the system while Nintendo isn't, and/or 2) the Vita games being released are mostly if not exclusively niche titles whose target audience is more likely to be on the Vita than the 3DS. Seeing the upcoming list of Vita releases, I suspect it's mostly #2. The quantity of new Vita releases may look numerically...decent?...but I can't see any heavy, or even modest, hitters in it. The better question, in my opinion, is "why are so many developers apparently jumping the 3DS ship?" But even that's relative: I'm pretty sure the 3DS will still have wider and better support.

Gungho's not the first mobile developer to make a lot of money on handhelds, specifically the 3DS. Angry Birds sold far better than it should have, for example.

But I doubt Squeenix in particular is going to change course anytime soon: they've been into mobile gaming since long before it became cool in the West, and have only been sliding more and more in that direction. In light of their practices I have to wonder how successful they actually are, financially speaking, and their apparent heavy reliance on whales to keep that segment going strikes me as a dangerous long-term strategy, but I suspect they'll continue to have fewer handheld games this generation than last.

Everything I've heard of Puzzles and Dragons, at least the mobile/tablet version, makes me think it is precisely the type of game that videogames should never, ever aspire to be. It's a scam based on nickel and diming the player, or the meth dealer who tells you that the first one is free...

As for "whales," it's a common term used to describe an individual who drops an enormous amount of cash. I believe it originated in casinos, where celebrities would swing by to special high-stake rooms and lose millions of dollars in mere hours. It's now also used in gaming to describe the player who spends hundreds or thousands of dollars on a single game, whether by purchasing all the overpriced DLC (think of the many games where you can buy an outfit for $1...and there are thousands of outfits) or simply using the game's "pay to win" system (P & D)

Isn't #2 exactly what everyone is stating? There are very few major 3rd party games releasing on vita, but several small to mid level games. The fact you can do a PS3/Vita or PSP/Vita has been very attractive for a lot of devs. It allows smaller devs to release the game while hitting their fanbase across multiple platforms.

Based on what I understand, almost, but not quite. The argument here isn't that the Vita sells third-party titles better than the 3DS, because the data don't support that statement. However, for sufficiently niche titles that are aiming for tiny sales (20-50k lifetime), it  may be more advantageous to target the platform where one's niche resides. I'll stop here before I get too deep into backhanded compliment territory!

As for cross-platform, I'll have to look into the technical aspects some more, but I strongly suspect that the cost of a PS3+Vita release is far from free: not only are the two different platforms, with all the technical headaches that involves, but if the cost was nil or even extremely low there'd be no reason why every game doesn't reach both platforms. As for Vita/PSP crossover, I've heard enough to know that simultaneous development does take a not insignificant amount of resources. Since the idea of these niche games is to be satisfied with meager sales, I have to imagine few of them would be willing to take on the added expense of creating an extra port. There's a reason Kickstarter projects try to extort several hundred thousand dollars more for additional platform releases, after all!