Heya everyone, Cloudman here again with something else to talk about.

Now before I get into this, I just want to clarify a few things.

First off, I don't have a Vita. It's not for reasons such as I hate it, has no games, or whatever reasons commonly seen on the net. I think the system is cool and there are games I would love to play, such as the Persona 4 Golden, the Tales games, Freedom Wars, and the game that I would buy a Vita for, Gravity Daze. However, due to time constraints and being plenty occupied with my 3DS, I don't play to buy a Vita in the near future.

Second, this isn't a thread just to bring doom and gloom to the system. It's seriously something I have thought about and wondered about, which is why I want to talk about it. So let's discuss it and keep the doom out of the thread.

Third, if a Vita thread like this has been done before, I'm sorry to bring it up again. I just want to hear the different reasons and suggestions as to why the Vita is in its current predicament.

So with all that cleared, let's get started!

The Playstation Vita! It's Sony 2nd handheld following the PSP, the system that did what no other competitor could do, which was stand against Nintendo with excellent success in the handheld market. For a long time, Nintendo held dominance, and Sony rivaled against it, doing very well. So they later came with the Vita, a powerful system that could rival graphics on the PS3 and had a lot of power and potential to do great things on a handheld. People still say it's the best handheld ever! Some people thought it would knock Nintendo out of the handheld business and take dominance over the mobile space too. Things were looking bright for the system.

But move a few years to now and it's fallen far behind the 3DS, a weaker, rather gimmicky system with Nintendo's standard kiddie, friendly IPs. How could this have happened? So it got me wondering as to why despite all the great things going for it, did it fall to the 3DS? Was it price, the games, the rise of mobile phone devices, or something else?

What do you think went wrong for the system? Personally I think the Vita was priced too high. It was priced at 250 USDs and 300 USDs depending on what model you wanted. I don't know about you, but that seems rather pricy. Also I think it lacked certain games to take off. Where was Sony's answer to Pokemon, Yokai Watch, or other popular mobile games? It's main core game, Monster Hunter, was swept from them by Nintendo for the 3DS. This game alone may have brought the Vita up. I also think it's design and image narrowed the target demographic. It seems to side more with the more hardcore demographic, which may or may not be interested in a console experience on a small device.  Also, the biggest audience for handheld games are kids. Many kids use handhelds to play on the go and with their friends. The Vita doesn't do very well to target them, which may have hurt the Vita too.

That's about all I have for the Vita and my thoughts. What do you think? Feel free to share why you think the Vita fell off course against Nintendo and the 3DS.

(PS - I considered doing this for the Wii U too, but the answers for its failures are more obvious, and another user started the thread earlier. So check that out if you can and write about how the Wii U sucks have intellectual conversation about the Wii U's troubles : ) )

Just like the WiiU, it had a flawed concept and not the best execution. The hardware itself is pretty rad, but the system has way too many shortcomings.

"with Nintendo's standard kiddie, friendly IPs"
this.
if vita had pokemon, mario kart and animal crossing, it should sell like 3ds is selling.

I don't have one either, but I would guess that it's because it does not have anything you can't play on a home console, except for some niche titles. Those titles mostly appeal to Japanese gamers, which is why it sells the best there.

The vita should've just been a more powerful PSP. No track pad, no expensive memory cards, first party support, no oled screen (even though it's pretty AF) and backwards compatible to psp. Would've been killer.

A very important part of ps2's early success before the killer games was that it was very much like the ps1 but more powerful and was backwards compatible. 

I have a Vita since launch and sadly, it feels like Sony never had a clear plan on what they wanted to do with it. Its like they released the Vita for the sake of having a successor to the PSP and nothing more.

It was western centric at launch, when we all know Japan is the biggest handheld market. It became an Indie Platform when the western devs left and now its a Japanese niche machine (which I don't mind).

But the lack of any concrete execution from Sony is what really hurt the Vita. I mean they didn't even push or improve the Playstation TV. :/

What was flawed about it? There doesn't seem to be many flaws to it at all. That's something I don't quite get.

Aside from the track pad, wasn't the Vita mostly a more powerful PSP? It seemed safer than Ninten's 3D tracking.

From my perspective it was just too pricey, Sony got some balls by making the memory card system with their own pricey cards which locked any choice of me being able to get different card from anyone else for cheaper, they hardly marketed the system and to this day I haven't seen a single UK advert for the Vita and to top it all off it lacked games I wanted that I used to have on my PSP from years ago, their latest model also decided to do away with the OLED screen which was much better looking than the one they sport now.

The design itself though is totally fine with me, I'm not a big fan of the touchpad on the back but overall it looks nice.

The design is fine with me too. I meant that more towards kids, thinking it doesn't look very appealing to kids with its black color and look.