CamHostage
Member
While it wasn't strong enough to compete with Nintendo's portables, the PSP was *very* popular in Japan. A lot of my Japanese friends (and my impression going to Japan a lot is that that sentiment extended to pretty much Japanese gamers in general) really, really wanted to love the Vita. But it didn't get enough support from the get-go to actually become a beloved platform, so when Sony killed it, most people simply saw it as something that couldn't be helped.
Oh, and you could tell even in the very early days that Vita was not cleared for success just as soon as people saw that a Monster Hunter was not in the early titles promised, and then every response from Capcom was weirdly hand-wavey about it. Something was clearly not right early on, and hopes for a sophomore success faded further and further as time went on.
It's sad, if you talk with developers from the time, I believe many would say that they thought good things of the platform because Sony was courting them in ways that never happened before. A friend of mine even told me, They came to us earlier than ever and they asked us what we thought of the proposed prototypes and what we wanted in a portable, it was so unlike Sony to do that. PlayStation was positioning Vita for success as well as they could imagine it, but I think they were getting non-committal responses right away from publishers (what with the mobile explosion and the rising production costs and some troubles in stores as well as the digital and indie revolutions leading to the general eroding of the traditional publisher model) That spooked them, and justifiably so, as both Vita and 3DS had rough beginning despite nice launch libraries. (3DS dropped the price and did some other extreme rescue projects that saved the platform to a degree, plus they also scored that slippery MonHun; I don't know if Sony could have pulled off any of those same tactics even if they tried.) They went early and hard on inroads for indie developers, to deal with the lack of publisher activity, and they encouraged the cross-buy program to build the idea of a multipurpose library. Some of that kind of worked (it's a big part of why Vita has as strong of a fanbase as it does two years after it stopped being manufactured,) but obviously it was never nearly enough to keep the platform competitive.
So the idea that Sony just didn't give a shit about Vita goes against some of what I understand (distantly) of the situation. They thought they had something good and that there was a battle plan for the next phase of portable console wars, and when not only did they get their asses handed to them, but they saw Nintendo pull up lame as well, they knew they were fucked. I still lament that they never made some of the changes that could have appealed to the few consumers they did reach (a Vita 3000 revision that just got rid of those damned Memory Cards would have been a godsend,) but everybody knew real quickly that Vita was never going to be a PSP2.