Failure of the PS Vita Part #2

Lo and behold, dear readers, as it is time for the main feature of this unnecessarily long documentation: the actual reason the PS Vita failed. As we've previously established, the PSP itself, despite a lot of dumb decisions on Sony's part, was not a failure, it simply lost the battle to the DS, but still remained lucrative - enough so that Sony didn't hesitate on announcing a successor, a system so immensely powerful it would blow any competition straight out of the water - and they spectacularly failed.

In an interesting move, after Nintendo announced the DS's successor, the 3DS on March 23, 2010, Sony waited almost an entire year to announce theirs, on January 27, 2011, slated to release later that year, tentatively titled the "NGP", which is short for next generation portable, whereas Vita is simply Italian for "life". It's likely that the later announcement was a calculated move on Sony's part to gauge how well the 3DS would be perceived - and surprisingly enough, despite the overwhelming popularity of the original Nintendo DS, the new 3D handheld had a rather tepid response, with people claiming the 3D effect was too gimmicky and that the system failed to innovate and was still technically behind. Funnily enough, all of these things were also said about the original DS when it was first unveiled - but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Both systems were announced for a 2011 release, with the 3DS coming out February in Japan and in March for most other markets. Meanwhile, the PS Vita had a domestic launch in December 2011 in Japan, and then in February 2012 worldwide. Once again, the handheld was likely long finished, but in a clever move, Sony delayed its release to gauge the 3DS's own success, and surprisingly enough, it looked like Lady Luck was on their side!

The 3DS had an infamously slow start. Sluggish sales and complaints about the system itself - as well its at the time high price of $250 (equivalent to $350 in 2024!). Common pain points included a lacking game library, with Super Mario himself notably absent, with Nintendo's sole in-house contribution being an updated version of Nintendogs, which failed to repeat its own success, Streetpass (basically a function that allows you to interact with other players while the system is in sleep mode) which was pretty much useless, because of the low sales, and only marginally improved processing power, being essentially a portable Gamecube, but in 3D.

This gave Sony plenty of time to carefully consider things and make announcements that would specifically address complaints leveled at the competition - a cunning move, mind you, but certainly an effective one. The Vita was set to destroy handheld gaming boundaries in a big way, boasting specs roughly on par with the PS3 - more on that in a bit. The following system features were the ones most advertised and/or talked about:

• A beautiful, bright 960 × 544 OLED screen, unprecedented for handhelds at the time. Meanwhile, the 3DS featured two comparatively cheaper LCD screens at much lower resolutions. 
• Two joysticks on each side of the system, themselves much-improved from the PSP's analog nub and the 3DS's own equivalent, which was susceptible to breaking with overuse.
• A touch-sensitive screen and a back touchpad which could be comfortably operated with a finger, as opposed to requiring a stylus for precise movements.
• Front and back cameras for photos and videos. The 3DS likewise had cameras and could take pictures in 3D, but the Vita had a 0.3MP camera that could take much sharper pictures. Note that in both cases, even in contemporary times, both systems had much inferior specs to literally anything else on the market, even on the emerging smartphone market, but the Vita still wins here.
• The continuation of the PSN, allowing users to play any digitally purchased PSP and PS1 games on the new system. Meanwhile, Nintendo opened a completely new storefront, which had to basically start from scratch, with even prior DSi games needing ports, and also no full games being available for purchase until much later.
• Communication features. Among other things, the PS Vita had a dedicated Skype app, allowing you to call people on the go, and the built-in microphone was okay enough, but the system also supported external mics. 

The system was also launched in two separate models, regular and 3G. Specs-wise, both systems are identical, the only difference being the 3G one allowed you, as the name implied, to insert a SIM card and essentially turn the system into a gaming phone with internet access anywhere, whereas the regular model could only connect to local wi-fi. The regular model retailed for $250, same as the 3DS, while the 3G one did for $300. This put Sony on equal footing with Nintendo in terms of pricing, with people getting a genuine amount of bang for their buck, as the 3DS was still considered overpriced for what was on offer.

Unlike with their previous system, Sony didn't really make much of an attempt to market the Vita towards a younger audience, instead going all-out on their "high impact", gritty adverts, and some that were weirdly sexual, like the one pictured above. And if you want a good example of just how much faith Sony initially had in the handheld, look no further than the high-budget commercials they put on TV and the internet - a far cry from the nutty squirrels of the previous generation!

Unfortunately, the actual marketing campaigns lasted nowhere near as long as they did before, which is kind of a shame. As you can possibly tell from the existing advertising material, though, they failed to show off much of the system itself, which didn't really help matters. There was one more ad, mostly pertaining to the shift of marketing towards the Remote Play functionality, which was likewise fairly sexualized.

It's a bit of a shame they didn't put in more effort, and them going the "adult marketing" route by making everything sexual felt bizarre. Yes, the squirrels were a thing, but that was in a very tongue-in-cheek way and didn't directly push a butt into your face.

Having faced a good amount of criticism for the handling of their new handheld, Nintendo granted a permanent price cut for the system in July 2011, about five months into its lifespan, dropping the price to just $170, a whopping $80! While this is not at all unusual for gaming hardware (in fact, it is almost always sold at a loss), it was unusual to have it happen this early on. Early adopters of the system received a bunch of free legacy games, some of which never got a wide release on the 3DS at all, such as Kirby and the Amazing Mirror! This was done due to the Vita's impending release, and Nintendo attempting to tighten their defenses in the face of it. However, at the time, it accomplished less success than was expected, with the game library, despite a few new important releases, still being considered somewhat lackluster. Sales did improve a tiny bit for the holiday season, with Nintendo specifically developing and releasing Mario Kart 7 that December to gain ground, but the system wouldn't really take off until 2013. Meanwhile, the Vita finally released in its native Japan in the same month, and actually ended up selling a respectable 300,000 units. It should be noted that as a whole, handheld gaming is much more popular in Japan than elsewhere, so these systems do a lot better by default.

However, neither Nintendo nor Sony were aware of the rising power that was the smartphone market, and with it, its games. Sure, in 2011, things were just beginning to take off, and most people didn't yet own smartphones, but the casual nature of many of these apps, most notably Fruit Ninja, made them an acceptable pastime for train rides or breaks at work - after all, nobody's gonna give you weird looks when just pulling out your phone at work, as opposed to a game console. At the time, there wasn't much reason for concern, as these apps were still in their infancy, and most people were convinced they wouldn't take off, but phones did, in fact, play a huge part in the Vita's own failure.

With the Vita making its debut worldwide in February 2012, things didn't start off too bad, initially selling 200,000 units in North America, which is respectable. However, when people finally got their hands on the system, a lot of its negatives also came to light, some of which would only be exacerbated with time. Here's a handy list:

• PS Vita games came on cartridges. While this was a good choice in itself, as it would counteract its predecessor's notoriously long loading times, it also left the system without a disk tray, and thus any backwards compatibility with physical PSP games and movies - games could only be purchased again digitally. While Sony originally announced customers would be able to repurchase already owned games at a discount, this never happened. Meanwhile, the 3DS remained backwards compatible with all DS games.
• The face buttons were extremely small and stiff. While this might seem like a minor issue at first, any people with larger hands will know the pain.
• The 3G model was, especially with the now much-higher adoption rate of smartphones, comparatively useless, as most people now already had a phone contract and didn't want another for a video game system.
• Despite using cartridges, game saves and digital purchases still had to be stored on an external storage medium. Not only that, but these new Memory Cards were also proprietary, prone to malfunction (my system once wiped itself) and supremely expensive! The cheapest one, which could store 4GB (and was thus already useless) cost $30, almost the price of a new game! Meanwhile, despite otherwise relying hardcore on proprietary hardware, the 3DS allowed the usage of regular SD cards, and most games still saved to the cartridge. Also, the data transfer speed was an absolute nightmare.
• The OLED screen, while beautiful to look at, had a tendency to leave burn-in, even when playing actively. 
• Only a few games ever made use of the system's additional features, such as the touchscreen or microphone, and that miniscule list of games only got less and less as time went on. Also, activating the back touchpad by accident was incredibly easy and annoying, unless you held the system in a specific way (it did have little swales where your hands where supposed to rest, but it was still easy to slip). Tearaway, Gravity Rush and Uncharted: Golden Abyss were the only major releases to make extensive use of the features.
• Battery life was once again a huge issue - however, it was at least equal to the 3DS's, with both systems lasting about five hours, maybe an hour more at lower settings. Still, this was a huge pain point for gaming sessions that took place away from home (or an outlet).
• In stark contrast to the PSP's well-received launch library, the PS Vita's initial lineup was not only small, but also criticized for lacking in many aspects. Let's compare the two systems again. Once again, updated re-releases or remakes are marked with an asterisk.

Interestingly, Rayman 3D is a port of Rayman 2, which was also available on the original DS and can be played on the PS Vita via official PS1 emulation. It should be noted that Sony put out a lot more first-party titles than Nintendo themselves did. Now go back one page and compare the PSP's lineup - quite the downgrade, wouldn't you say?

Both systems competed on more or less equal footing throughout 2012, although the release of several key games, most notably Super Mario 3D Land and Kid Icarus Uprising, did help move sales a bit faster than Sony did, although they also had a strong competitor with their unconventional action title Gravity Rush. However, all of that would change in 2013, which saw the release of not one, but two killer apps for Ninty's handheld, and would change the trajectory of the battle permanently.

The first of these was Animal Crossing New Leaf, which had been out in Japan since late 2012, but would finally see its international release in June 2013. This game broke sales records of several magnitudes, selling a grand total of 13.04 million copies in its lifetime, and also accounted for many more 3DS being sold as well, repeating much of its predecessor's success on the DS. This game helped build momentum for the summer, and continued to sell well enough to warrant a major update in 2016. Then, in October, Pokémon X & Y launched worldwide, sealing the deal for good, selling 16.68 million units, becoming the fastest-selling game for the system by a wide margin.

However, that wasn't the only thing going against the Vita. The aforementioned mobile games market had gained serious ground, and 2013 was the year where smartphone adoption was at almost 100% - now it wasn't just something that the cool kids in school owned, but even your parents and grandparents did - and you probably got spammed with cute cat pictures as a result. Either way, mobile games were no longer cute distractions, but full games were now either ported or made for iOS and Android. Square Enix was an early supporter, porting some of the older Final Fantasy games, as well as investing in original mobile IPs, such as Chaos Rings. And even games with microtransactions, such as King's Candy Crush Saga, and the huge amount of gacha games ended up raking in cash for mobile devices. Even games that were previously free suddenly got paid content or were now ad-supported to cash in on the success. Not only that, but even full games on mobile tend to cost less than on consoles and handheld. For example, you could buy the 3D version of Final Fantasy IV for $40 on the Nintendo DS, or just $15 on phones - and you'd even get a version with better graphics.

This put the Vita into an awkward position. While the 3DS was the weakest out of all platforms, it still had the benefit of a hugely original and fun library that kept people coming back. Meanwhile, Sony's handheld received less and less original titles. Instead, it ended up receiving ports of console games, mainly the variety that was already released on the PS3 and sometimes 4. Problem was, while the Vita's specs were indeed on-par with the PS3, it didn't use the same hardware pieces, which rendered a lot of these ports as passable to barely playable. A good example: Borderlands 2. It's a mess of a port with terrible controls, and the frame rate is in the teens. Seriously, just see for yourself:

Now, obviously, sloppy ports are almost always the fault of the development team. However, there is only so much optimization even an experienced dev can do. Sadly, there is precious little information on Vita development online, but I did happen upon a devlog detailing the porting process of indie darling Bastion to the Vita, and judging from what the developers say (I know some of these words!), it simply wasn't possible to do everything they wanted to, because the architecture wasn't suited to it, so they did the best they could. I'd highly recommend to give it a read, because it's some great insight.

So, not only was the Vita getting hurt by the rising mobile game market, but it also had an unimpressive library compared to the 3DS. In an obvious attempt to mitigate this, Sony launched the Playstation Mobile service in 2012. This was, essentially, an Android kernel built into the Vita, which allowed mobile games to be ported with minimal effort, and since the system came with a touchscreen, the controls only needed minimal adjustment too, although most developers did have the courtesy to include button controls as well. This was obviously meant to entice developers to port their games over, but it accomplished fairly little in the long run - the library remained fairly small, and the entire service would be discontinued in July 2015, rendering all of these games lost as a result. In what is an unquestionable trolling move on the developer's part, the former PS Mobile game Adventure Labyrinth Story was quickly ported to the 3DS instead, and actually sold well on the platform and got good reviews. The Mobile service was actually a really good idea on paper, and it could've worked had it been utilized to its full extend, such as doing some proper advertising! The fact that you could play mobile games with button controls would've actually been a good way to get gamers who dislike touch controls onboard, but they completely flunked it and let the service die a slow, painful death in obscurity, much like the handheld itself.

Unlike the PSP, the Vita only saw one major revision and one "branch" of the system, for the lack of a better word. The revision, which has the development title of PCH-2000, never got an official store name, simply being sold under the same title, although fans typically call it the Vita Slim. Like before, it reduced system size and weight, added a USB type B port and, oddly enough, replaced the nice OLED screen with a cheaper LCD one, which was actually a huge downgrade. As an upside, its battery life was extended by about an hour, give or take. It was probably an attempt to sell off more systems in the face of failure, but it ended up selling even worse than its previous incarnation.

And then, for some bizarre reason, Sony made another attempt to breathe new life into the system, in the perhaps most "WTF"-sort of way: by releasing a home console version of the system! And no, I'm not kidding, just check it out:

The PS TV, was in essence, an HDMI box adaptation of the Vita, being only playable on TVs. This wasn't unprecedented, mind you, as even the SNES had an adapter that could Gameboy games on TV, but the system completely sacrificed portability! This is especially weird given that the PSP could output to a television with a simple cable, while the Vita had no such functionality. Worse yet, not all games, mainly older ones that had been abandoned by the developers, were compatible with the device. About the only advantage this provided was that content creators had an easier time recording gameplay footage by way of HDMI capture, but beyond that, it was a rather dumb idea, and needless to say, it didn't catch on.

Meanwhile, the 3DS played it relatively safe: first coming out with the 2DS, a cheaper alternative without the clamshell design and lacking 3D functionality, then releasing its first major revision in 2015, the New 3DS, which improved the specs a bit, mainly in regards to internet speed and boasting a few exclusive games that made use of the increased horsepower. Then, that same model would see another revision, the New 2DS, which eschewed the 3D functionality once again, but was cheaper and came in sleek, neon-like designs. All of these models sold well enough.

The Nintendo 3DS would continue to receive new games well into 2019, when its own successor, the Nintendo Switch, had already been out for two years. Interestingly, while the Vita would also receive its last game in February 2019, it had been unofficially discontinued much earlier. Most notably, its version of the PSN had more and more games delisted. If you log in nowadays, you'll find almost nothing, which is quite sad.

One feature I didn't mention, however, was the system's capability to perform remote play. Basically, by hooking it up to a PS4 and with a sufficient internet connection, you could stream PS4 games to the Vita and play them on the small screen, in a manner not too different from the Wii U, which did free up the TV if somebody else wanted to use it. However, this did require a really, really good connection, as the games were entirely reliant on the internet speed instead of system specs. This left the feature useless for people in more rural areas, or for those who simply couldn't afford or get better internet connections. Despite this, it was one thing that kept people using the Vita, and for several years was cited as one of the bigger selling points.

Unlike with the PSP, the modding and homebrew community didn't take off until much later. For the longest time, the only possible hack was to load the PSP OS on the system and continue playing the predecessor's games on it. The first actual Vita hacks wouldn't come out until 2015, and they developed slowly. Given that Sony themselves had little faith in the system left, they didn't do a whole lot to contain the situation either - if anything, they were probably happy it helped them sell off some of their product stock at the very least. Nowadays, the system is a darling among the modding community, and new things continue to be developed, including ways to overclock the system, making some games run a whole lot better. I won't go into it too much, but for a fun experiment: go onto YouTube and just type in "PS Vita in 20XX" and see the myriad of videos that will tell you why the Vita is the perfect handheld for the current year, and there is no sign of it stopping.

Uniquely, the Vita also lacked a true "killer app". The best-selling game on the system was Uncharted: Golden Abyss at 14k units. Meanwhile, the best-selling 3DS game was Mario Kart 7, at 19 million units sold. Some people would perhaps point to Persona 4 Golden, a re-release of a PS2 classic, but this was long before the series managed to reach the international recognition it's got today.

In the end, the lifetime sales of the Vita amount to about 15 million units sold. By comparison, the 3DS sold almost 76 million units. This actually meant both systems underperformed compared to their direct predecessors, but the 3DS was still a commercial success, while the Vita is regarded as a pure flop. The emerging smartphone market definitely played a role in this, as well the system's lackluster library. Despite this, it still had a lot of cool games: Gravity Rush, Uncharted, Tales of Hearts R, and Ys: Memories of Celceta are just a few examples. While most of these did end up getting ported to other systems, a few exclusives remain, most notable the aforementioned Tales game, as it only received a re-release for mobile phones, and only in Japan, making this the only official English version to play.

This also meant that Sony abandoned the handheld market altogether, now focusing entirely on their home consoles and phones, which was probably for the better. However, they still threw people a bone with the introduction of the Playstation 5 Portal. Basically, it's a peripheral for the PS5 that allows you to play games on a smaller screen, once again using the same remote play technology (and once again requiring a damn good internet connection to work). It has no standalone functionality, but it is a good alternative for households with only one TV and multiple people who'd like to use it.

It's also quite sad, because all things considered, the Vita had a ton of potential, and it initially looked like it would live up to it, what with Sony carefully probing the market and making much more calculated decisions than before. But by ignoring the mobile market for so long, they ended up creating their own worst enemy, despite being in the smartphone business themselves.