Chances are you‘ve heard about or even owned one of Sony‘s many successful PlayStation consoles. The PS1 pioneered 3D gaming in the mainstream. The PS2 is the highest selling home console ever, moving over 155 million units in its lifetime. More recently, the PS4 sits as the 4th best selling console of all time with 117.2 million sold and counting according to Sony‘s latest earnings report.
Sony has undeniably left their mark on gaming history thanks to these seminal home consoles. However, their track record in the handheld gaming space tells a very different story unfortunately.
You may be less familiar with the PlayStation Vita, Sony‘s foray into the world of portable gaming. Launched in 2011 to great fanfare and impressively powerful hardware, the Vita failed disastrously to capture any meaningful market share in an area dominated by Nintendo. It was discontinued quietly just 8 years later as one of Sony‘s biggest hardware missteps.
Come with me on a tour through this product‘s brief, unfortunate lifespan to understand the myriad of reasons why Sony‘s slick portable ultimately ran out of batteries.
What Was the PlayStation Vita Exactly?
First, a quick primer on the device we‘re about to autopsy here. The PlayStation Vita sought to build on Sony‘s first handheld, the PSP, with significantly updated hardware bringing portable gaming much closer to home console-quality experiences.
At the time of its release, the Vita‘s specs were undeniably cutting edge for a handheld:
- 5" 960×544 OLED capacitive touchscreen display
- Quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processor
- 512MB RAM
- 128MB VRAM
- Dual analog sticks
- Dual cameras
- Six-axis motion sensing system
On paper, this seemed like the total package to deliver PS3 era gameplay in a portable form factor. Sony also sought to integrate more multimedia capabilities like web browsing and social features leveraging cameras, mics, and 3G connectivity in certain models.
More than anything though, the Vita was Sony‘s play (pun intended) to directly challenge Nintendo‘s dominance in portable gaming cultivated through its enormously successful DS and emerging 3DS handheld lines.
So with seemingly capable hardware, Sony must have given Nintendo a real run right? Well…not so much.
The Writing Was on the Wall Not Long After Launch
The Vita first released on December 17, 2011 in Japan, followed by the global launch throughout early 2012. Initial sales seemed promising enough – over 300,000 units sold in its first week in Japan and 200,000 sold in the first month in the Americas. Hype was high among Sony‘s loyal fans who were eager to see the company competitive again after the PSP fell far short of Nintendo‘s DS sales.
However, momentum began to slow considerably after those launch windows. Let‘s examine how prospects for the system quickly deteriorated and never recovered by looking at some key data points:
Launch Month | Sony Global Sales Target | Actual Global Sales |
---|---|---|
Feb 2012 | 1.2 million | 1.2 million |
March 2013 | 10 million | 4 million |
March 2014 | 12 million | 10-15 million lifetime |
You can see plainly Sony substantially overestimated demand for their new handheld pretty much out of the gate. By March 2013, actual sales amounted to only 40% of Sony‘s initial targets. They would go on to miss their (already scaled back) target of 12 million sales by 2014 by at least 33% according to most industry estimates.
These numbers must have been startling for Sony brass considering the PlayStation brand‘s rich pedigree in the living room. But in portable gaming, they simply couldn‘t find an audience that chose its hardware over Nintendo‘s 3DS.
Speaking of which, how did sales of the 3DS compare in a similar post-launch timeframe? Funny you should ask! Check out some numbers:
Time After Launch | Nintendo 3DS Sales | PlayStation Vita Sales |
---|---|---|
1 Year | 13.5 million | 4 million |
2 Years | 31 million | 4 million |
3 Years | 45 million | 10 million |
As you can see, Sony was playing catchup from the word go. But the market had already deemed Nintendo the undisputed leader in this space. Without any brand loyalty or library of exclusive, must-have software to leverage the impressive Vita hardware, Sony just couldn‘t convince customers to give them a look.
To add fuel to the fire, mobile gaming on smartphones/tablets completely exploded in popularity at the same time, eating up more of the "on the go gameplay" market Sony hoped to target with Vita. The writing was clearly on the wall by 2013 that their handheld experiment had missed the mark. But recognizing this failure publicly was something Sony struggled to come to terms with at first…
Sony‘s Pivot to "Companion Device" Came Too Little Too Late
By mid-2014, most industry insiders widely acknowledged that Sony‘s next move would be to quietly sweep the Vita under the rug and hope its core fanbase could sustain it. Comments from Sony execs like President Shuhei Yoshida signaling a strategic shift for the Vita basically proved an internal white flag had been waved on the device being a mainstream success.
But Sony had just come off the successful launch of the PS4, so admitting another failure was likely seen as an undesirable distraction. Their solution? Quietly recast the Vita from a stand-alone handheld system to more of a companion device to PS4 through programs like:
- PlayStation Now – Sony‘s game streaming service to access old games
- Remote Play – Play your PS4 games on Vita by streaming from the home console
The writing was on the wall here for anyone following Sony though. These programs were last ditch efforts to get any residual value from their旗hship handheld by making it serve the now thriving PS4 ecosystem. That likely helped Sony save some face and prolong shelf life for existing Vitas. But it was abundantly clear there would be no true successor handheld, or any kind of major new Vita hardware push from them down the line.
Yet the companion programs helped maintain just enough of an install base for niche developers and publishers to release new Vita games over the next few years. This allowed Sony to save face by loosely claiming the Vita platform was still active. But make no mistake – by mid 2015 Sony‘s internal teams had moved on from creating anything new for Vita besides some ports of PS4 games.
That trickle of third party and indie games on Vita persisted for almost 3 more years before Sony officially declared hardware production over in March 2019. But by that time, writing comprehensive obituaries on the Vita‘s lifespan as a whole was overdue.
So In the End, What Really Went Wrong Here?
As with most notably disasters in this industry, there‘s no smoking gun or single point of failure you can easily identify as the reason the Vita flamed out so quickly. It was a perfect storm of strategic misfires by Sony stacking one on top of the other to sink their handheld ambitions. If you want to boil it down simply though, everything stems from software issues rather than any hardware deficiencies.
To recap briefly, the Vita itself was impressive piece of kit from an engineering perspective. It bested Nintendo‘s 3DS by a mile in graphics, screen quality, processing capabilities and other key metrics. Hardware alone does not make a platform thrive however. Software sells systems, and convincing both internal and third party developers to support your platform is critical.
Sony utterly failed at building up a healthy, sustainable lineup of exclusive Vita content. And they couldn‘t lean on their home console game studios because of terrible timing…
Releasing the Vita in 2011 sandwiched it right between the aging but still mighty PS3, and the imminent launch of the PS4. First party studios had to divide limited resources between developing PS3 swan songs and next gen PS4 launch titles/tech demos. Supporting yet another new platform became tertiary concern for Sony‘s own game creators, let alone outside studios.
The wider industry rightly saw more potential revenue focusing on PS4. Nintendo meanwhile had a years long headstart growing the 3DS userbase, making it the smarter handheld bet. This pincer attack of ignored internal priorities and multiplatform publishers chasing better incentives elsewhere ultimately left the Vita criminally bereft of quality exclusive software.
Hardware sales languished due to software gaps, and studios ignored Vita‘s impressive specs because the install base didn‘t warrant sizable investments. Cue the death spiral.
Sony seemingly couldn‘t recognize this pitfall quickly enough because of classic corporate tunnel vision and inertia. But imagine how differently things may have played out if Vita had something on par with a Mario or Zelda anchoring the platform for years. We‘re left to wonder what may been with the Vita had Sony moved sooner…
But that‘s the story with so much gaming hardware isn‘t it my friend? The tech writes checks game creators can‘t cash. Still, for those us who owned a Vita, we‘ll always remember its untapped potential. I‘d love to hear your own personal stories and memories with the PlayStation Vita down below!