PlayStation Vita sales hit new low in Japan

Two initial comments:

1/ Nintendo should be making as close to as much profit on the 200k Animal Crossing digital sales, as they are on the 600k retail shipped units. Retailers will be buying units for no more than 50% of the retail price - and digital has no shipping, shelf or manufacturing costs. All in all, this is close to effective sales of around 1.1m-1.2m units. There might be a small discount on digital only sales though. A few more weeks like this, and Nintendo's financial's will be looking a lot better.

2/ With PSV sales hitting a new record low (4k?!? wtf?!?), and 3DS selling close to 200k ... this is a sales ratio of 50:1. Has there EVER been a similar sales ratio between "current-gen" consoles for Sony/Nintendo, either way?

Also, has Assassins Creed for Vita launched yet? Maybe that will give a bump...

Posted:6 months ago

Sony should have settle for a PlayStation Phone like everyone wanted.
With the size and popularity of phones like the Galaxy Note 1 & 2... the PS-Vita with phone capabilities could have worked just fine,and give more weight to the PlayStation Suite initiative.
At least, that's what I think. It's more complex than that. I know that for myself, I can't afford a PS Vita, but I need a phone... and I would get a PlayStation phone with contract before another one. Plus, because of a 2 years contract, users would be "forced" to stay on their platform for that amount of time at least.

Posted:6 months ago

Drop the price of the Vita, and include a free memory card. £150 for the wifi version plus free card.

Fantastic piece of hardware but, IMO, it's just too damned expensive.

Posted:6 months ago

This utterly destroys the Vita: http://www.google.co.uk/nexus/7/

On the go people do not want narrative games, they want bus stop games.

Posted:6 months ago

2/ With PSV sales hitting a new record low (4k?!? wtf?!?), and 3DS selling close to 200k ... this is a sales ratio of 50:1. Has there EVER been a similar sales ratio between "current-gen" consoles for Sony/Nintendo, either way?

The biggest gap I've found going all the way back to 2004 is on Oct 1st, 2006.
DS - 276,000
PSP - 25,000

That's about an 11:1 ratio.

I have a feeling that the PS2 might have outsold the GC during some weeks in similar fashion but I don't have the figures to back that up.

Edited 2 times. Last edit by Jim Webb on 17th November 2012 4:04am

Posted:6 months ago

There's more to portable gaming than 'on the go'. I play my vita more in my home than anywhere else. We have a dev nexus 7 in the office, and for gaming, you can't even put them in the same category.

Posted:6 months ago

Play Need for Speed Most Wanted on Vita vs Tablet and tell me which destroys which. Go on, you know you can be objective if you try *really* hard.

Posted:6 months ago

I'm now convinced that Sony stuffed up with the PSV, by NOT putting a UMD drive it in - and hence making it a completely new platform from the PSP.

Whereas DS owners have an easy upgrade path - buy a better DS, continue playing all your DS games ... and developers can shift from the DS to 3DS ... the same doesn't apply to the PSP/PSV. They have segmented both the consumer and developer market.

A price cut won't help .. much. If they cut price early (and this is BROKE Sony here - they really can't afford too!) - it will be a complete death.

Like with the PSP, they need a MH type hit to invigorate the market.

At this stage Sony might actually prefer LOW level of profitable sales, rather than a HIGH level of loss-inducing sales. And they will almost certainly give it this Xmas, and see what happens.

...

What I'm curious about now... could the same thing happen to the PS3? The WiiU will be out no, have a year head-start ... and there is no guarantee that the Orbis will be backwards compatible with the PS3 (heck the PS3 was barely compatible with the PS2 for those that remember 6 years ago!).

The WiiU is also going to make the "play handhelds at home" argument a lot harde, as the WiiU gamepad becomes *easily* the most powerful console AND handheld on the planet (at least for a while). No portable device can burn 75W of power generating all those gfx & CPU.

Posted:6 months ago

Actually 100% with Bruce on this one. Mobile games NEED to be pick up and play, quick fix, quick fun. I lrather like my Vita but 6 months on and I'm still playing Lumines and Wipeout 90% because they fit in to my usage model and I can't see anything coming that I'd specifically want to play on the PSV over the console version of the same game. Call of duty on the Vita? Why? It just doesn't fit for on the go gaming! Sonya really need to stop pushing the PSV as a mobile PS3 and switch to pushing it as a simple mobile entertainment device tailored to quick, high quality, mobile gaming. There is a market, it's just being catered for almost exclisivly by Nintendo!

Posted:6 months ago

Exactly, Alec. The traditional handheld market for portable experiences is only being catered for by Nintendo right now. Sony have fundamental misconceptions of what will sell a dedicated portable in the current climate; stripped down home console games might have worked to an extent on the PSP, but when tastes have continued to shift towards daily use games that aren't time intensive (Tetris did this excellently in the beginning, Brain Training one of the DS titles that continued this trend), Sony are being pushed out of the traditional space by Nintendo and given no-where else to stand by Google and Apple.

Vita is a brilliant piece of hardware, but the market is so competitive now, and peoples wallets so tight, brilliant hardware alone just isn't enough to make a system succeed.

Posted:6 months ago

I just realized this is about to get much worse for Vita.

The 3DS will see the Dragon Quest VII remake in Feb and Monster Hunter 4 in March.

Posted:6 months ago

Fabien, Vita could easily be a phone. Even with the two joysticks sticking out a bit, it fits easily into my pocket, and holding it up to my ear for a few test calls on Skype felt comfortable.

My hope is Sony will treat Vita like they did their PSP, come out with 7,000,000 different models. One of which can have phone functionality enabled, and cost $350. It probably wouldn't be as successful as the recent $299 Nexus 4 phone from LG, but it would sell a lot better than the current Vita is.

Posted:6 months ago

The Vita still sold more than the 360 in Japan so things haven't gotten that bad....yet.

Posted:6 months ago

That's about a 14:1 ratio.

About. 11.04 to 1. :)

Posted:6 months ago

^Correct. I was calculating a software sales difference that I planned on posting about as well but then edited it out and left the wrong ratio. That will bug for at least 5 minutes.

Posted:6 months ago