Could Sony have turned Vita into a success, or was it doomed from the start?

Nintendo with the DS was good at differentiating between their console and handheld games. Psp and Vita were just handheld versions of what was available on their big brothers. The touch mechanic on the Vita was not a great idea.
Proprietary memory cards, bad idea.
As always Sony simply throws something onto the market, but cannot/will not support it because its too busy supporting the main console at the time.
 
Vita is an amazing device and has some stellar games available. I don't want to go full list war, but I genuinely loved Uncharted. It was fantastic to have games that look so good on the go. I'm playing Dragons Crown at the moment and it still looks brilliant especially with the OLED. The price and memory cards were an issue, but compared to the 3DS at launch the Vita was better value in my opinion. I know it wasn't Naughty Dog, but a console releasing with Uncharted is insane.

Anyway, I think Nintendo just have the mindshare when it comes to handhelds. I think handhelds are seen more like toys and given the choice between a Vita and a 3DS for a kid it's always going to be the 3DS that wins.

It's a shame the support for Vita dried out, but even though it failed commercially and didn't stay true to near AAA gaming on the go, there is no denying that indie games and hidden gems were still enough to keep a lot of engaged. I love remote play and even subscribed to PSNow to play PS3 games too. Shame the service is no longer supported.

I guess I went mega off topic here, but I love gushing over this device. Great piece of kit.
 
Sony didn't get much western developers on board, kept letting developers run games sub native so they looked like smeared shit.
Then they failed to get key 3rd party titles in pretty much every category.

Letting monster Hunter go from psp exclusive to 3ds exclusive is one example.
Another one is the terrible COD game that wasn't the same as the latest console version.
 
Vita is a amazing Portable Console… the fault lies with sony for not support it

I thank PS Vita for bringing the game of my life

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This might be petty. But the cost of extra storage actually turned me off more than anything else.
 
I have a feeling if they'd tried to get it to a lower price, by dropping such gimmicky features as the camera, back touch pads, and gyro, maybe it would have been more of a success. They were simply too pricey with too few games.
 
The combination of development costs increasing via the impressive Vita technology, which could do a decent PS3 imitation, and the handheld market contracting, sealed its fate with third parties.

I think this is a big reason Nintendo picked the hybrid approach. It doesn't make sense for developers to pour so much time and money into a product intended only for a niche market, to be played on small screens, or on the go.

In a sense, handheld gaming had evolved so much, it could no longer fit it's former constraints, and needed to reinvent itself.
 
Never saw one in a store, ever. It was DOA, not sure anything could have saved it.
 
It still has potential till this very day. In my personal opinion, Vita is the ultimate portable handheld that Sony created with the exception of the those damn memory cards. Feels better in my hands compared to the Switch.
 
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Vita was my favorite handheld but Sony hamstrung it with their pricy memory cards. Also, some Sony first party studios were not onboard with it from the start like Naughty Dog. That effectively killed the Vita before it could really get going. Still got Gravity Rush and countless indies from it so it wasn't a complete waste.
 
It's biggest problem was price.

They could have ditched a coiple of underused gimmicks, like the rear touchpad and cameras, and more importantly went with microSD cards for storage, and the cost would have been significantly cheaper.

As a secondary issue, they also needed more broad appeal software. Something like Pokemon to appeal to kids, an Animal Crossing or the Sims like to appeal to women, a big online multiplayer game to catch the teen market and so forth.

The games it had were brilliant, but the reason Nintendo sells so consistently well in the handheld space is because they know how to cast a wide net and provide top quality games that cater to a very diverse audience.

This is particularly baffling in many ways, because this is the same thing that Playstation already doea in the home console space, better than Nintendo even, but without 3rd parties to work with so heavily in the handheld space, they needed to pick up the slack, and just didn't.

The Vita is still the best handheld ever made, but it just limited its audience too heavily and so only sold to weirdos like me, and we're just not a sustainable commercial base.
 
I think it was doomed. I just don't think there's that big of a market for a dedicated handheld focused mostly on adult gamers--at least outside of Japan. A Hybrid like the Switch? Sure as people who don't have much use for a portable can play mostly docked to the TV.

I also think it's just a bad for the types of games Sony is known for. Something like Uncharted Golden Abyss just felt inferior playing on a tiny screen vs. playing the PS3 games on a big HDTV. I think a lot felt the same and thus a lot of Sony's PS3 base just wasn't interested in buying a portable and playing worse looking entries in their favorite franchises.

Nintendo with their cartoony graphics doesn't have that feeling for me. Hell, a lot of their stuff I prefer on a smaller screen and think it doesn't look that great blown up on a big screen (though that's more them opting for low power than the handheld/console thing). Plus Nintendo has long had the kid/family market in the handheld space on lock down. They're the safe option for parents who want a dedicated portable to keep their kid occupied in the car, or in the house with out occupying a TV. The smartphone/tablet market certainly ate into that, but the 3DS still sold well and it's still a decent part of the Switch/Switch Lite's market.

All that said, I did enjoy my Vita as it was great for things like Indie games with pixel graphics that I think look terrible blown up on a big TV, long RPGs like P4G as I rarely finish those if I have to be tied to my TV but can chip away at them here and there over a few months on a handheld. The Switch has taken over the Vita's place as where I play retro style indies, some RPGs etc., along with being my usual Nintendo console for their big games.
Excellent wrap-up of the matter IMO. I think the same.
 
If Sony was willing to sell it at a loss, meaning it was cheaper, and if they used regular sd cards instead of that expensive proprietary crap, yeah I think it could've gained a much bigger marketshare.
And also they should've just called it PSP 2, vita is just, a weird name.
 
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Its a shame. The Vita is simply a great portable but Sony bailed on it. Until recent times it was doing great in Japan but Sony didn't care to push that support worldwide or at least in US and UK. It really wasn't doomed from the start as it was doing great. Sony pulled the plug without no reason
 
I wish Sony would've done something like Nintendo did with Switch. In fact I wish Sony would still do that - but it would be crazy expensive given Sony go for high fidelity.

Vita got close with cloud saves and cross-buy. A Vita 2 "hardware wrapper" which docks to a PS5 base station so the graphics and performance both on the go and docked are the highest fidelity.

But I guess power consumption, heat and minaturisation preclude all that for now.
 
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I think the lackluster launch titles had dissuaded interest from the start and the unexciting future lineup sealed its fate. The US launch titles were mostly PS3 ports and b-tier games, with nothing to compete with the 3DS, which by this time had Zelda:OoT remaster, mainline Mario, and mainline Mario Kart.

PSVita seem like a product that was released without an audience in mind and Sony perhaps knew this as well. It came out at a time when younger gamers were switching to smartphones and when portable gaming was on the decline.
 
It lacked big games. Unfortunately I don't see sony invest in that way.
One of the reasons that make Nintendo handheld sell so much is that they treat them as primary consoles. For Sony portables are secondary and it shows in support, line up, investments, marketing and so on.

It shouldn't have marketed like a home-quality device on the go because they didn't want to invest so much into it. Market Vita as a streaming, indie, low price device at least would've given it an identity.
 
It started with a horrible name and quickly ended with Sony taking it out behind the shed before it even had a chance to grow up.
 
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AAA gaming should have been address and was the main issue with the PSP, historically, consoles and handhelds succeed through their AAA game production.
 
Frankly? Yes.

DS even though has a few superb games also has a bunch of crapppie games. And I'm not even counting 3DS.

If I could find the same quantity of games I have on DS I would dive Vita easly. I'm still sour for buying this piece of junk 3DS just to play trashmon. This device its terrible gamewise.
 
I think Sony users never wanted handheld consoles and hated Vita (and PSP) for not letting them play handheld games into their home consoles.
Memory cards prices is just an excuse to rant, I actually prefer to buy once an overpriced memory card instead of paying extra price in each digital game I buy
Vita was dead after an year or so, when Sony understood this message and quit on trying
 
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Hell, even in the post-apocalyptic setting of The Last of Us, Sony are still selling those memory cards at stupid prices somehow.
 
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It was doomed from the moment Sony decided to skip supporting it with their exclusives.
Vita launch was actually pretty amazing and console sold well.

IT was everything later that sink console. First Sony stopped caring and then third party stopped caring.
On other hand they refocused everything to make PS4 successful.

Fighting on two fronts is not smart idea.
 
The handheld market lives by one general rule: The cheapest handheld released by a major game console manufacturer will always win. The Vita should have dumped the touch stuff, added SD card storage and sold under the 3DS's price. It wouldn't have completely negated the 3DS that generation due to brand loyalty, but they would have sold a heck of a lot more units. Enough for a third Sony handheld.
 
I have two vitas. The answer to that is no. I liken the vita to a turbografx. Great games for people who lile ot but little to no popular stuff.
 
It was doomed - Sony didn't have the necessary first party support as their efforts were focused on their home console and next gen console.

the Proprietary memory cards Were an issue and it was poorly marketed

it also came out at a time when mobile phones were really evolving and changing the industry and Sony didn't have the ability to drop the price like the 3DS or roll out first party hits and add to the young demographic like the 3DS either

I got one at launch and enjoyed the tech And games I had. But thankfully I Sold it for as high a price as I could several months later and recouped most of my money back. It would have been one expensive paper weight otherwise.
 
I never had a VITA so I need to ask, VITA vs Switch, how does that pan out?

Was Switch better at its release date or was it VITA?

not a fair comparison to make or ask to make

for one thing, the vita is a dedicated handheld and not a hybrid system.

If you buy FIFA on your switch, you can play on the go or on your tv

If you buy fifa on the vita, you would also need to buy fifa on the ps3 or ps4

that's over simplifying it but is one of the many reasons they are not direct comparisons.

a fair direct comparison would be to the 3DS or something.
 
Nintendo can't be beat on that market so it was doomed from the start.

but it wasn't Nintendo - it was the entire mobile industry that changed

Nintendo also struggled. They had to really bet their IPs and drop the price quite drastically to ensure the 3DS success.

vita did not have the luxury of Wide appealing third party support nor Wide appealing first party support like Mario or Pokémon

the market conditions were a huge factor, much more than Nintendo
 
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High price.
Lack of real AAA support from Sony studios.
Memory card price issues.

I don't know. 249$CAN for a handheld ahead of its time with more features than the NSwitch sounds very good for me. I think Sony had no clue on how making 1st party handheld game appealing to the mass consumer. Their marketing was lacking too, they easily could have pushed it further.
 
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No Monster hunter and you got no sales at Asia. That leads to many Japanese developer not as interested to the system as they hope to be. I see that as the main reason of it failing
 
Agreed. The Vita really was the best Sony handheld since the original PSP. It's hard to call it a failure. A failure was the PSP Go
The Vita was perfect and had some solid support, the market just bailed. A shame, legit goat tier handheld
 
Nintendo being forced to lower the price of the 3DS from $249 to $169 shortly after launch helped it, but it really hurt the Vita. Both at $249 would have made the Vita a much better option. After the cut, If Sony was willing to take a larger loss and launch at $199, as well as use cheaper memory cards, I think the Vita would have performed much better.
 
There wasn't really any singular issue that hurt the PS Vita's chances. There were several smaller problems which (in combination) contributed to its struggles.

This post sums up just about all of them:

PS Vita could've been a hit had Sony taken a few key steps.

1.) No Proprietary Memory Cards - This was unnecessary, and showed that Sony learned nothing from UMD and Memory Stick. Micro SD would've been a better alternative.

2.) If you had to use them, then don't price them way above standard - $20 for 4GB is laughable. These Cards really should've been $5-20 MAX.

3.) Market the damn thing - Even at launch, the Vita had barely any advertising. They should've ran a substantial ad campaign that demonstrated the console's unique capabilities, not put out 2 commercials and that's it.

4.) Get better third party games - Banking your system's future on a Crappy CoD spin-off instead of some decent exclusives or ports is laughable. Try to get better deals with third parties, and make sure to get the right games the PS Vita needed.

5.) Invest in more first party games - I get that Naughty Dog and the like aren't interested in developing for underpowered handhelds. But You should've found more developers who would support the Vita using PlayStation IP, and get some of your lower tier developers to make more games for it. Games like Gravity Rush and Tearaway should've been way more common than they ended up being.

6.) Don't compete with smartphones - Instead focus on what makes the Vita unique compared to smartphone gaming. Switch has shown that both types of systems can co-exist, so Vita could've done the same.

This is all what the Vita needed to have a better chance in the market.

The memory card issues (points #1 and especially #2) got a lot of attention in this thread, and other similar discussions. Sony could've gotten away with proprietary memory cards, if only they had priced them reasonably.

#3 was a huge problem in the US. Sony stopped running TV commercials about 3 months after the system was released. The problem wasn't that a lot of gamers actively disliked the system--the problem was that so many people simply weren't aware of the system to begin with. Most consumers had no opinion (either positive or negative) about it, because they didn't even know it existed.

There were two other problems that (if Sony had addressed them) could have also helped, and I hope Jubenhimer Jubenhimer doesn't mind if I continue the numbering from his post:

7. While the system has a great library of downloadable PS1 and PSP games, there were still many games that were unable to be purchased and/or downloaded onto the system. Some could be placed on a Vita using funky workarounds (such as downloading to a PS3 and installing from there), but some others were completely unavailable to Vita players, even if they legitimately purchased them for one of their previous systems. Many of these were for weird licensing reasons, or simply that the publisher never gave approval. Sony should've fought harder to ensure that 95% or more of those games could have been available.

8. There's a great non-portable version of the system called PlayStation TV, but it has even lower compatibility with downloadable PS1/PSP games. Again, Sony should have ensured a significantly higher level of game compatibility. Better yet, they should have enabled the PS Vita itself to connect to a TV and play its games that way. PSTV could have still coexisted as an inexpensive alternative for those who didn't care about portability (sort of like the reverse strategy of the Nintendo Switch Lite), but the Vita could have been a much stronger system if it also had TV connection capabilities on its own.
 
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