While it found a small but loyal following, the Playstation Vita failed to achieve mainstream success; do you think this was inevitable and that the circumstances it faced were insurmountable, or do you think there was a chance for it to succeed, had Sony done things differently?

Yup. High price. Proprietary cards. AT&T. Sony was booed on stage for announcing AT&T. Weak launch lineup. Bad marketing. Sony set it up to fail from the moment go. Oh, and no native backward compatibility. Granted, they fucked themselves by going disc on a portable system in 2004. So at launch, 3DS already had every DS game playable and a cheaper price (tho still priced too high at the time) 

I do love my Vita and PSP but Sony had no clue what they were doing. No one understands the market like Nintendo. 

There was a lot against it from the start, yeah

Apart from the high prices, horrible 3G version and proprietary memory cards, Sony focused on two wrong things.

-The hardware wasn't strong enough for the whole home console gaming on the go they tried to push with the Vita. There's some PS3 ports even from Sony themselves that are embarrassingly bad.
-Social media apps/movies/3G wasn't a selling point by that point because smartphones already existed. This worked with the PSP because it released in 2004, before the first iPhone, but in 2011? Nah.

And then there's no big game at the launch. Or ever. Nothing that makes you think, "wow, I need to play this". There's lots to love about the Vita library but it lacks that kind of game (or games).

Price was the main problem at launch, just as it was for 3DS. 3DS had to cut the price from $249 all the way down to $169 just a few months after launch. If Sony hadn't gone for an OLED screen they may have been able to make a $199 price point work.

If they could have offered it at $199, ditched the 3g model entirely and gotten better versions of FIFA it could have been a LOT bigger in Europe. A better launch can snowball and completely change it's fortunes.

The original PSP would have been doomed too if the iphone come out before it.

A lot of people got the PSP to listen to music and watch videos on the go on their long transport journeys.

Well, 3G was totally unnecessary for a handheld, so the higher price of that model and AT&T weren't really a minus point.
A Vita without 3G wasn't much more expensive than a 3DS XL.

The propriatary memory cards were a stupid move... they should have used micro-SD-cards instead!

If you already had a lot of digital PSP games (f. e. PSP Go owners), most (all?) of them were compatible on the Vita.

And there were great sales of PSP games with very attractive prices... much lower than most DS games for the 3DS. Here are mine:

And there were also great sales of PS1 games with very attractive prices... many of them lower than VirtualConsole games for the 3DS:

Crossbuy games were also an awesome idea: a handheld version for the Vita + a "docked" version for PS3 and/or PS4 bundled together for one price were practically the predecessor of Switch games with handheld and docked mode.

PS+ was quite cheap back then (~3 Euros per month) and every month some Vita games (and sometimes PSP games) were added to the "instant game collection"... totally worth it for Vita owners which also had a PS3 or PS4.

Some of the PS Vita's problems were the same problems Wii U had.
-Bad marketing
-Terrible name
-Lack of compelling software
-High price tag
-A gimmick people didn't care for (touchpad)

On top of it's own unique problems
-High priced memory cards (even the Xbox 360 had this, but the PS3 being the PS3 still made the 360 look better, while the 3DS just needed the cheap SD cards)
-Needing to use AT&T for the 3G Wifi
-No native backwards compatibility except for a few PS1 classics and PSP games (assuming you bought these digitally, if not you had to rebuy)
-Somehow having the worst versions of PS2 games even though the hardware is a lot better than the PS2 (R&C Collection, Sly Collection, Jak Collection, etc)
-God awful storefront

With all of that going against it I'm shocked it even outsold the Wii U, but then again Europe and Japan helped it push a little above the Wii U in WW sales.

The moment they decided to go for the weird 3G - AT&T and custom memory cards, the crippled the system. However, it was not unsalvageable. Nintendo managed to rescue the 3DS when its launch was weaker than expected, Sony could have done the same with a price discount and more 1st party titles. They just decided it was not worth it.

Yes.


Killed it day 1
Bad name.
Proprietary memory cards instead of universal

Final nails in the coffin.
Dropped first party support relatively quick
Lack of Marketing and focus due to them focusing on PS4.

Managing two different platforms that do not share the same library is tough, which is why Nintendo moved from 2 platforms to 1.

No Mario = no success