The rise of mobile gaming certainly hampered the Vita's chances at success, but the main culprit behind its quick demise comes down to one thing... price. Once you start getting above the $200 mark for a handheld dedicated gaming device, you can forget about being successful. Nintendo found this out the hard way as well when they released the 3DS at $250 initially.

Combine the high price point with the fact that the handheld gaming audience generally skews much younger, and a lack of any Pokemon-type killer app software for the thing, and you have the classic recipe for failure... just like mama used to make!

the 3DS has been doing fairly well

Same reason what Wii U made a failure, Nintendo. In Vita case Sony.

And yet 3DS managed to sell more than 50m till now.

It would be same logic if look at Wii U numbers and say because home consoles are dead.

walsufnir said: Lawlight said: Because handhelds are dead.   29,271 33,168 48,300 117,887

Because handhelds are dead everywhere except Japan. Fixed it.

I fixed my statement. Still , 50M thanks to Japan and multiple revisions.

-Mobile market. It hurt handheld gaming badly.

-Power. The Vita's specs are comparable to those of the PS3. That could mean a lot of dual releases on those systems, but why develop an exclusive Vita game when you can sell it on the PS3 too (and later the PS4).

-Multimedia functionality is not new anymore. A PSP back in the day could do wonders, even if it used its battery too fast. Now a mobile phone can do the more things, and better.

-Awful pricing of the memory cards. In a system that has massive digital sales, this made the Vita a really expensive machine. A regular 32 Gb SD can cost 25-30€ at most, the same size costs 50-60€. You pay almost 2€/Gb.

-Bad launch. Both the 3DS and the Vita had an auful launch. But while Nintendo inmediately went full force into repairing that (quick pricecut, big Mario releases...), Sony's help wasn't nearly as effective.

-Lack of killer app and Sony's support. Nintendo has managed to adapt almost every single one of its franchises into handheld, so the system had a lot of potential. The Vita, however, did lose a lot of support. Monster Hunter abandoned it for the 3DS, and GTA didn't come back after Chinatown. The rest of titles that could move units needed to come from Sony itself, but after a couple of games, they stopped. Vita's JRPG support is probably superior to any current gen system (give the PS4 some time), but that is not a demographic big enough to keep hardware moving.

-Lack of piracy. This may sound bad, but the PSP sold a decent amount of units thanks to it being easy to hack. The Vita has none of that, and those pirates went to other systems.

Lawlight said: walsufnir said: Lawlight said: Because handhelds are dead.   29,271 33,168 48,300 117,887 Because handhelds are dead everywhere except Japan. Fixed it.

Maybe Vita is dead everywhere except Japan, 3DS sold 130k in September in US, thats on pair with Japan.

In Japan handhelds were always more popular than home consoles, also we always had multiple revisions for handhelds.

Lawlight said: walsufnir said: Lawlight said: Because handhelds are dead.   29,271 33,168 48,300 117,887 Because handhelds are dead everywhere except Japan. Fixed it.

It sold more in the west than in Japan.