It should have launched $50 cheaper as the second model probably. It needed to have more dedicated exclusives, and be advertised more.

PS3 was already well established with a big library of games that could absorb that many ps+ games. PS4 also has problems with some of their game sales and plenty of their PS+ games have been indie style games, and rarely a AAA style game at this point. It does affect ps4 but nowhere near on the scale of the Vita because 3rd party devs are racing to make games for it and their AAA games sell on it.

It wasn't the vita price. Expensive things sell, look at iPhones. But they didn't make it a must own product by its target demographic and they didn't target the casual demographic enough. I bought two vitas, because I believed in the possibilities it could create, the promise of console quality gaming on the go. But it's a dying market. Look what Sony is doing with the Xperia z3. It'll hook up to a dualshock 4 and stream ps4 games. If Sony will start porting ps2/vita/psp games to their improving mobile market.than they might have something special. This is my hope, considering Sony has already exited the dedicated handheld market.

In a market where the 3DS needed emergency measures to right itself in the beginning and probably won't even catch up to the PSP, a premium "console on the go" approach was pretty much doomed from the start. There was never a big enough market for the system to be successful outside of Japan, regardless of how Sony handled it.

The games. Why would I pay for something where the library is almost entirely derivatives or actual ports of games I could already play on my PS3?

Also, the memory cards. I am still refusing to buy one even as a gift for my son just on principle over that bullshit. It's like Microsoft's laughably priced HDD, only they give you the option of using a $9 flash drive. Sony gives you no such option.

It's a shame because the PSP was such a beast.

I've seen this misleading statistic shown off more than enough times. It does not mean that retail Vita games have actually sold double what they appear to have sold on VGChartz. It means that Vita owners buy almost as many inexpensive indie games and PS Classics as they buy physical retail games.

Given this figure was provided by Sony, I also suspect that it counts games acquired through PS Plus and cross buy as "sales."

1. Terrible marketing
2. Too expensive, even worse including memory cards and perceived by potential buyers even worse than that after Ninty radically cut 3DS price
3. Too few big, system seller 1st party games and lack of PSP biggest 3rd party series, Monster Hunter Freedom (ports of older titles or minor spin-offs aren't enough)
3a. If Sony decided its new portable must not depend on a big and important specific 3rd party series, it should have replaced it with a 1st party series with the same appeal and selling power. A Monster Hunter killer, that is, a game that trigger in a large number of gamers the same collector cravings that MH (or on an even larger scale Pokémon, but for decent additional sales MH scale is already enough) causes.

Nothing went wrong from Vita's end. It's a flawless handheld. It was, like it has been discussed here for the millionth time, the Smartphone exponential growth to play games.

everything. Sony screwed up, big time.

So you "suspect", then you're not proving anything just like I thought. The real fact here is, Sony confirmed that 49% of the games they sell on Vita are on Digital, doesn't matter if those are AAA/indie/wver, those are games, nothing to brag about. I have, digital only, quite a few AAA games: P4G, Tearaway, Uncharted, Soul Sacrifice and Dragon's Crown. My first retail game ever on Vita will be Freedom Wars besides the one that came with the bundle. So sorry to ruin your suspicion, but that is definitely not applicable here since Vita costumers do buy digital AAAs too a lot.