Hey everybody! I hope everyone is having a good Christmas season out there in the AAA community. What I’m going to talk about today is the first year of the PS Vita with all the ups and downs (mostly downs), and what the future might hold for the pretty little handheld.

So the Vita launched a year and a day ago as in Japan as I’m writing this, and it had a pretty auspicious start in the lands of the rising sun selling 325,000 units in the first few days, a good launch compared to other systems like the 3DS. However, in the next weeks the sells cratered dropping to as low 12,309 units in the week of February 13^th, and being outsold by the PSP. Now the sells have recovered somewhat in the following weeks averaging about 40,000 a week worldwide. This pattern followed with the North American and European launches, initial sales was great and then sinking down to low levels. The black Friday and holiday sales good, but this is likely a temporary bump as with all holiday’s seasons sales always rise dramatically over normal sales figures.

So now let’s look the games released for the system so far. There are currently 158 games as of writing for the Vita. Of these 25 were the launch titles, including Little Deviants, Uncharted: Golden Abyss, Wipeout 2048, Rayman Origins, BlazBlue: Continuum Shift Extend etc. The best selling game is Uncharted with 850,000 units sold and will likely also be the first 1 million seller on the system. Not of the other games come close to Uncharted; however three games have about half the sales. Some of the games have been released to critical acclaim such as Persona 4: The Golden which is the highest rated handheld game in 2012 on Metacrtic. Gravity Rush has won handheld game of the year from some publications. So the Vita does have some games to answer that question people like to ask all the time about Sony systems haha. There are a couple games that came out this year that were suppose to turn the fortunes of the Vita around, the so-called “Killer App” that people are always talking about that sells systems, but neither Call of Duty: Declassified or Resistance: Burning Skies became the killer app as both suffered from bad controls and were a little short on content. One of the key selling points people were touting was the ability of Vita to play FPS on the go with the dual analog sticks. Now that two high profile FPS have come out and both have been utter disappointments and in my mind this has damaged the Vita brand.

There is isn’t much to say about what Sony has done to turn around the lackluster sales of the PS Vita because there hasn’t been a permanent price cut, the marketing has largely remain the same, and the Playstation Plus is now on Vita and that should help with sales, how much it will help remained to be seen.

Now I’m going to discuss some things that I think Sony can do to turn Vita around and get it selling good. Here’s the strategy I have conceived that Sony can follow to make sell well and make a profit. They cannot drop the price until the handheld can be redesigned into a form that makes a profit off each unit, otherwise Sony will be losing even more money then they already are on each unit sold. This could take a year or so, but in the end be worth it if they include the features I’m about to list. Include a drive to play all the PSP games; all of the people on the fence about buying a Vita that have a big PSP game library would have a huge reason to buy the system. Add an SD card slot; having only Sony memory cards as the only storage media on Vita has hurt the system even if its not the main reason people often point too. The Vita memory cards are expensive and are an unnecessary extra expense for buyers when they probably have a few SD cards they could be using to store games and data. Extend the battery life of the system; this is probably the easiest one to implement as it has been done many times for other handhelds. The most recent example being the 3DS XL, which added an extra 1.5 hours to the 3DS’s battery life, so it is not that hard. This could also be done through third party batteries such as the ones by Nyko, and that’s what I did with my 3DS and its battery life is actually better than the XL’s. Make games that are an unique experience to the Vita; I think the major problem with Sony’s ideology towards Vita is that they are trying to create scaled down versions of PS3 games for Vita instead of developing games from ground up specifically for Vita. In order to attract people to spent the money on a new hardware you need to have exclusive software that is found no where else. Marketing the Sega Genesis style; it would be extremely funny to watch Sony do some commercials along the lines of the ones done by Sega against Nintendo in the early 1990’s, and seeing how those worked well for Sega it could work for Sony as well.

Well until next time,

Devil_Survivor