PlayStation Vita hasn’t had an easy go of it in its first year on the market. For as promising as the handheld appeared to be before its release, it’s failed to light the sales charts on fire both in its native Japan and in the west. As a result, questions about Vita’s future have already arisen in earnest as Sony continues to stand by its machine, seemingly unaware (or simply unwilling to admit) that anything has gone wrong.
Before Vita came out, it had everything going for it. At E3 2011, we expected Sony to tag an unreasonable price on its shiny new handheld, but the company did the exact opposite, pricing it fairly and giving it early appeal to would-be adopters. The vacancy of steady releases that slowly overtook the PSP’s latter years was quickly nipped in the bud, with Sony intent on using both its first-party resources and the power of its third-party relationships to give Vita a promising library of games right off the bat and for the duration of its first 12 months.
Perhaps most importantly, Vita was primed to roundly trounce its primary competition in the form of Nintendo 3DS. Its dual analog sticks and high-tech innards seemed to give it considerable leverage, allowing it to play games the 3DS cannot, easily besting it technologically. Likewise, seamlessly hitching Vita to PS3 (and vice-versa) with the ability to play some of the same games over both platforms appeared like it would be too good to pass up. The stars aligned for PlayStation Vita, or so I thought, and I predicted it would be successful as a result. But as I’ve stated many times in the past year, I was dead wrong.
The question now is what went wrong? How did something so promising fall apart? How did Vita fail to connect to consumers? And perhaps most importantly, can Sony salvage Vita’s out-of-the-gate stumble, call it a false start, and set PSP’s successor on a positive sales trajectory that will allow it to achieve some of the major success PSP found? The answers to these questions are, not surprisingly, complicated and multifaceted, and it’s difficult to come to a positive conclusion that paints Vita’s future as anything but flagging.
Vita’s failure to thrive can perhaps be traced back to the weeks and months before it was released, when the cloudless skies hanging over the handheld suddenly began to look overcast. News slowly but surely leaked about Vita’s capabilities – or lack thereof – including its lack of substantial built-in memory and heinously expensive memory cards that players would have to purchase to download and save games. Depending on the size of the memory card purchased, you'd have to tack an extra $100 or so onto the otherwise affordable price for the Vita itself. Suddenly, Vita wasn’t looking like such a good deal at retail, and the memory card issue persists to this day as a major roadblock barring entry to gamers on a budget.
Is it though?
Amazon is subsidizing its tablet by selling through music and videos, and collecting user data on what you are browsing, and what you are buying and playing. They definitely do this with the Amazon App Store -- their store runs as a kernel level service on the tablets and can monitor what you are doing, and their terms of service no doubt indicate they will grab your demographics nicely.
Google is selling the tablet at very low profit margins because they make the money back on your google account. They catalog and analyze everything you read write and buy with your account, even if they don't watch your activity on the tablet itself. They see your searches, they monetize that with their primary source of revenue: advertising.
Sony... doesn't do those things? Yes they know your profile by what you buy on the Store, they could potentially track what you play on the Vita as part of your gaming profile if you happen to be online at the time, and even that goes on and off with the Vita to save battery. Sony tries to make a profit on the handheld, and then makes a royalty on every game sold.
These are two very different models. With Google, Amazon, Microsoft Bing, and Android in general, the consumer is actually the product in many ways. Android exists to keep you using Google services -- why do you think Amazon didn't just decide to use Google's Android instead of making their own flavor of it? They want you in their world so they can watch, analyze, monetize, and sell to you more directly. With Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft, the product is the hardware, the games, and the service offerings.
And before you go down the rabbit hole of saying games are too expensive when so many iOS and Android apps are 99 cents or free, go find out how many iOS and Android developers are making money. Only a select few can live off their game revenue, let alone fund further development.
Until consumers understand that they are selling away their privacy and personal activity data on their tablets and phones in order to bring the price of those devices down, they won't understand a standard-price electronic product like a handheld game device from Nintendo, Sony, or anybody else.
It could be that the era of the dedicated handheld gaming device is over, but I'd wager that Sony is trying to mitigate that with its PlayStation Mobile efforts and services like Music Unlimited, Netflix, YouTube, and other apps on the Vita.
I'm surprised more Android developers aren't going to Vita. Yes the numbers are low for install base but the piracy rate is probably vanishingly small. Android is hacked 10 ways to Sunday -- rooting any phone immediately gets copies of your app thrown into the wild to be side-loaded by whoever wants them at no charge.
Taking the PSM route IMO would be more cost effective for the consumer and developer since they only need to pay $100 a year and we can get a games like Shadow gun and Dead Trigger for like $5 and with small file sizes. Shadowgun Deadzon is only 128mb(online only) and is amazing. Those two games are free on the Play Store ; due to Google being cheaper for devs, but if people see they can get console quality games for a device with dedicated controls for $5 instead of $40, they're going to be more inclined to purchase a Vita. But its up to Sony if they want PSM to really take off.
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