I found the last generation to be a disappointment with the exception of the PSP. Honestly, it was the best handheld I have ever owned and one of the best systems overall. I was super pumped for the Vita and now I wouldn't bother with it if you gave me one for free. It has nothing to do with mobile gaming and everything to do with Sony's numerous blunders. It's almost as if they did no market research and have virtually no clue as to what PSP fans like myself wanted.

This article lists all of my biggest gripes with a couple exceptions. First, they launched far too late when they should have beaten the 3DS to the market. It's not like they had to worry about cannibalizing the PSP's declining sales. Seriously, why did they wait so long to launch it? Sony waited until they were no longer relevant to portable gamers. Secondly, their mishandling of PSP in its twilight years didn't help either as it damaged their position in the market, especially the PSP Go fiasco. Finally, it might be fairly minor but the very name Vita was terrible, why not the PlayStation Handheld?

Stopped at the second paragraph

Wow this guy is really fucking mad. Who even cares about this stuff anymore? This wasn't even news 2 years ago

That was just a coverup statement. A slew of things killed the vita. It's not so bad in Japan because they have more games even though most of them are SD Anime games. If you won't support your own system, nobody else will.

If a product fails its always the responsibility of the owner. At the same time, its extremely naive to think that Mobile gaming didn't play a significant role. The reason most people don't understand is because they ignore the fact that Sony and Nintendo are not the same company, they cannot do the same things, and in a way they are polar opposites.

Using Nintendo as example doesn't work for three reasons.

1) Sony is not Nintendo

2) Nintendo has lead the handheld market since its inception, if anyone is going to survive a hostile environment, its the guy whose been in first place forever.

3) Even the 3DS took a hit, just cause it sold 50 million, doesn't mean it didn't take a big hit.

Notice how the 3DS's highest peak is smaller than the lowest peak of the NDS, and It follows right afterward. There is the argument of normalization, but it the Vita went through the exact same phenomena. Not to mention its already in decline after a year, as opposed to the NDS which didn't maximally peak until year 5.

The memory cards, while obsene, make perfect sense when you consider the fact that the PSP was an outright failure for Sony as well. 

Sony is not Nintendo. Sony makes money from software, Nintendo makes it from hardware. Guess which one you can pirate. Guess which company's handheld had the greatest piracy rate of any console.

If Sony's Vita was even a greater hardware loss then the PSP, then having piracy wasn't an option. Even if Sony was as fisically safe as Nintendo.

this, is not unlike what happened to the dedicated PDA market, despite what many still think, its already happened, they key point is...rockstar games grandtheft Auto: San andreas is on both iOS, and Android but not on the PSVita, or the Nintendo 3DS..that right there should infact tell you somthing, the worse thing is the PSVita has the very same series of PowerVR GPU as the very same one the iPAD III has! slightly tweaked to run faster but still both are running ARM core design's SOC's, but yet there you go..the largest 3rd party mobile devlopment studios and publishers have moved on to mobile , because of sheer Number's.

I've still never seen anybody nail exactly what I've been arguing about the Vita's failure as well as Extra Credits. Everybody ignores the issue of developing on handheld marketed as a console being expensive as shit, the fanbase ignoring the games and console when they see they're not console-tier as they were marketed, and the cycle continuing. On paper you could make multiple 3DS games on the same budget as one Vita game - with a higher profit margin at that - until recently when developers found out what appeals to the current Vita owners.

Nintendo makes way way waaaaaay waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more money from software than they do from hardware.

People who think the Vita died because Sony didn't support it really, really need to take a look at what really happened. Sony supported the Vita. Sony STOPPED supporting the Vita because the Vita failed, not the other way around. It just simply was not working.

The author of the article isn't being logical or even very intelligent. PS1 games would have had no impact. PS2 games would have had no impact. Marketing niche games? Seriously? No impact. Indies? There are a million indies on smart-phones. Bio-shock? I don't think this guy understands that Sony does not control third-parties.

I don't really understand the refusal of some to accept that the handheld market has changed greatly and that Sony is not in a position to fight the tide. The Vita had no shot in the west in the current climate. Nintendo's handheld division is still alive because they have the legacy IP and a high level of brand recognition in the west. Sony does not. It's as simple as that.

While Sony certainly played a massive part in stopping Vita from reaching bigger numbers, I don't think even with full support it would've been a success in today's market. To completely ignore the impact of mobiles is just bizarre.