Sony: Mobile Market "Climate" to Blame For Vita Failure

[Something Amyss]

No, the biggest things to damage the vita were poor marketing, high price, extorionate proprietary storage, piss poor first party support and a general apathy towards the product from Sony.

It's a solid system but all I really play on it are indies and PSP titles, I've played maybe 3 actual vita games, which were really good and very impressive, but4, they fucked up, the market has it's difficulties but the Vita failure is entirely on Sony's back.

I think it should be their final handheld because they suppoprted this one so badly that it's almost definately killed what market there was and Nintendo is very strong in the market now, though the 3DS is affected by the mobile market it's still incredibly successful and has a great library.

Bascially, yeah. I don't get why they even bothered with a handheld if they were going to just drag their feet the entire way.

The mobile market is certainly a factor, but this really is primarily on Sony. Which is a shame,because the Vita is a competent handheld. I just wish they didn't charge an arm, a leg, and your firstborn for storage.

 

[Lightspeaker]

Its all been said above really. I love my Vita. I actually like the system itself more than I like my 3DS but by the gods did they mess up with it. Also the whole proprietary memory thing is incredibly annoying. Its somewhat unfairly maligned as "having no games" which isn't exactly true, but most of the games available for it now are JRPGs and if you don't like those well...yeah.

I think it might also have suffered a little from exactly the same thing Nintendo did with the Wii U. There seems to be a bit of "well it seems to be exactly the same as their old console and its named nearly the same so is it just a slight upgrade?"

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I dunno man, the 3DS is doing fine.

 

[MrJinks]

I haven't owned a Vita, but a bit of looking things up tells me that the battery was proprietary and not replaceable in the classic or the slim version? Others have pointed out the memory shortcomings, marketing etc, but to my mind the battery is something else that would have dissuaded me from buying a Vita. My current phone doesn't have a replaceable battery, but it seems to be lasting (2 years now) and I expect to replace it and not be too concerned about the games on it. I know replaceable batteries add weight, but I would want the nostalgia of being able to use a console many years later. If the battery dies, can a Vita be run solely from mains power?

 

[Sheo_Dagana]

I LOVED my PSVita when it first came out. The machine was powerful and had a lot of potential. Unfortunately, nearly all of the first-party titles were shit and a lot of the games that followed weren't much better. The Vita was doomed because Sony didn't seem to give two shits about it at the end of the day. You never saw any marketing for it and the game library was sparse even several years after it's launch.

Is it any wonder that Monster Hunter made the jump to Nintendo's 3DS?

 

[FPLOON]

I still own a fucking PSP... and no one has told me that the Vita makes a better MP3-esque music player than the PSP... Also, fuck having the Vita needing it's own special storage stick... The latter's the main reason why I would not buy a Vita pre-PSTV...

Other than that, if the Vita had Kingdom Hearts on it, I would have bought a Vita without any [major] complaints...

 

[Tsaba]

With all the changes in technology the last 10 years, it's hard to imagine why you would want/need a mobile gaming system, and well to be honest, I'm sure the draw down in Iraq and Afghanistan sure didn't help either.

 

[thewatergamer]

Yeah sure that's what caused it, nothing to do with the lack of real first party games, overpriced memory cards and terrible marketing...nah, smartphones are the cause!

 

[Kameburger]

I'm gonna go against the general flow of the thread here and say he's absolutely right. Were there mistakes made at launch? absolutely. Launching with a very minimal library of games and then delaying PSone classics for close to a year after launch were definitely a factor in ensuring that the vita would spend the beginning of it's life climbing out of a whole. That being said, the vita had a lot of really great features and awesome hardware, and some really cool games, and I think it's biggest weakness was in fact, that in it's native Japan, mobile devices had largely grabbed the commuter market which was huge in Japan, and losing titles like monster hunter to the 3DS, which had helped drive PSP sales in it's later days, probably dealt a significant blow to the college student and youth markets.

Even personally it is undeniable that my phone, despite having less quality games, was easier to play on as I commuted simply because I could multi-task if I had to. I could respond to texts for instance and go right back to what ever I was playing. Ironically at the time, and I bought my Vita at launch, I was really hoping that they would improve a lot of their platform to better support non-gaming applications. I wanted my Vita to replace my tablet. It had the technical potential after all, but this never materialized. The browser felt like garbage, the applications where choppy slow and buggy, almost to a shameless degree, and now it's just too late.

I feel like they could have introduced some of this increased functionality and created a kind of tablet environment. Even if it was just checking emails. I still love the system, and it is definitely my long trip companion but, after that last final fantasy 7 port for iOS, I can kind of see phones replacing handhelds all together in the not so distant future. But I still love my Vita while it lasts, and I hope it lasts long enough for that HD port of FFXII that keeps getting teased lately.

tl;dr: Phones are just more convenient and a dedicated gaming handheld is becoming more and more of a novelty, and an expensive one at that. no matter how much I love it, I can only use it when I want to truly shut out the world, which is becoming less and less important as I age.

 

[Hairless Mammoth]

They should have seen the cell phone market as a threat back when the Vita was coming out. They designed it to partially compete with mobile - touch screen, ARM processor, 3G as an option. Sony tried to make a niche luxury device that did high end games, while fusing smart phone characteristics into the package. It became a jack of all trades, master of none (which cost more than just getting two different masters).

That's my main complaint with the Vita since the beginning. They put too much stuff into it. It didn't need the touch screen, the useless 3G, or the extra powerful (for the time) CPU. It definitely didn't need the touch panel on the back. All of that jacked up the price. The only things it needed were a little more horsepower over the PSP and that second analog nub we've spent years asking Sony for since the PSP came out.

Also to be the thousandth to say this today, the proprietary memory killed it more than piracy could have. Even Sony's Memory Stick Duo (what's used in the PSP and other Sony stuff) is remarkably overpriced compared to SD cards. When I got a micro SD card to MS Duo adapter and a 32 GB micro SD, I bought a lot of games off of PSN to carry around on my PSP. Some people would have loaded that card up with illegally acquired media, but most would throw more money at Sony and publishers, just for convenience's sake.

 

[disgruntledgamer]

Smartphones having transformed the mobile market into a place less than friendly for premium portables like the Vita was well known before the Vita was released or even thought about. No excuses you don't release a new VHS machine when it has to compete with Blu rays , DvDs and Digital Downloads doesn't matter how advanced the VHS is.

 

[mysecondlife]

Sony is to blame for Vita failure.

 

[Lightknight]

Sony, I'm a customer that owns a PSP and a Vita. The problem isn't the mobile climate, it's two things:

1. Proprietary memory: The moment someone developed an adapter for the PSP I immediately bought ten playstation games to store on it. You're needlessly limiting how many games we can buy with this shit. Stop it.

2. Games: Where are the games on the Vita? We've got the five or so good ones but beyond that all we can enjoy are old PS games. You can't afford to put out no games on a console. That's just ridiculous. I had the same problem with the PSP which I still use exclusively as an old PS gaming system.

With all the changes in technology the last 10 years, it's hard to imagine why you would want/need a mobile gaming system, and well to be honest, I'm sure the draw down in Iraq and Afghanistan sure didn't help either.

They're great for traveling and provide much more technologically demanding games than cell phone games provide.

 

[Hiddelgreyk]

Apart from the problems specific to the Vita itself, who wants to carry around dedicated single-use hardware when they've already got a good general-purpose device? Maybe Sony should look into designing a high quality Android smartphone that is more comfortable for relatively long gaming sessions than ones currently on the market, and develop games for that.

The Xperia Play [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xperia_Play] would like to meet you...


Well I do like my Vita, Sony. And should you ever actually release anything for it again, you bet I'll be interested (looking at Gravity Rush 2 in particular!). But until that day, should it indeed ever come, I'll have more than enough games to play (mainly because the Vita is the first PlayStation system I ever owned, and thus, all the ports of older classics it has are a great way for me to catch up on some PS history).

I also really love my Wii U, btw.
It's only now dawning on me that I may simply be insane, though ;P