The Vita is in big trouble, but it can be saved

Price cut : Agreed Bigger library : agreed (but not because I think there aren't any good games) Needs monster hunter : Sony needs to shell out the cash and get that series back where it belongs. That vid y'all posted of the 3ds gameplay of ultimate showed that that camera is a pain and that the game looked like crap compared to what I think the vita could do. And almost anyone who's played it on psp knows they'd rather have it on the vita with 2 sticks instead of crab clawing with the nub on psp or DS. And in defense of the library: some of the games have the series started on a console, so try not to compare the two versions so much. In light of that, there's AC, Uncharted, ragnarok odyssey, soul sacrifice, P4G, and sly 4 next year. Personally I think that sounds like a pretty good list for now.

Capcom had Nintendo make the circle pad pro for monster hunter so the control is a moot point and you are using 3 ultimate(a redone port) and not 4(a new game) for your graphics argument(not that they ever mattered for any series sure the game looks better but still plays the same)

Ah, I forgot about the circle pad pro. I can't really compare it to two sticks since I've never used it. As for graphics, yes I should have used 4, not ultimate. However, I've seen gameplay for 4 and I honestly still think it looks crappy on DS. And yes I think the graphics are a side matter but it would be nice if they looked as good as they could.

Oh that ugly ass mutation lol

Persona 4 was a step in the right direction, but the main problem right now is that it needs more high profile games.

No it cant... unless Person 5 lands on it. That would be pretty sweet Lol

It can die till I get my psp games.

The Vita needs a price drop of 20% or more and a Monster Hunter. Seemed to work really well for 3DS. There is nothing on PSV that I feel I need to buy the system for. I really like Sound Shapes, but that's not enough. PSV should be like a portable PSN machine as well as a crossplay machine. The multimedia features are there so I don't have much to complain about, but I don't need another multimedia machine.

They should fill out their PS2 library on PSN and allow the Vita to play those games. PS2 had the best library for any single system, and giving the Vita the capability to play those titles would be insane.

Put more RPGs on it and it will be fine P4:G is stealing my time but it is the first game to do so since I got it at launch.

At the beginning of the PS3's life they sold the system at a price lower than the manufacturing price so they were losing money on each system sold with the aim of getting money back on software. With there being few games currently on Vita that're going to grab peoples attention, that strategy may not be that viable in the long run. I myself, I was considering buying a Vita, but the lack of games and the price tag ($350 in Australia) put me well off that idea. Instead I picked up a second hand PSP for $89 and put my psone classics on there and will slowly build up a collection from the wide selection available. What I think is the problem though is that games are simply too expensive to develop these days, and when you do have the money you want to concentrate where the consumers are and that's on the consoles. Only the biggest developers will produce games for yet another platform which is what we've seen with Call of Duty and Assassins Creed. Until sales go up, you're absolutely right. If Sony want the Vita to be a success, they'll need to produce the reasons why people should buy it. Lower the price of the hardware and the games by say $10 and bring out some killer games for it. In the meantime, I'm afraid Little Big Planet isn't a flagship title, and Call of Duty is played by people wanting to abuse each other online, not by people wanting to play it on the go. The wrong games have been released at the beginning of the Vita's lifespan It's not dead yet, but Sony have some serious work on their hands if they don't want it to be

As an Australian resident, I have disagree with your pricing of the vita. You'd pay $250 for a console along with a game and a 4gb card.

when it first came out though, $350 for the wifi version and over $400 for the 3G. The price has dropped since, but still it's not cheap

You're right

I don't see how the Vita's in that much trouble. The 3DS was a commercial failure until its price was dropped, and even then it sold 4.5 million in its first year. The Vita, with much less favorable circumstances than the 3DS (such as the Japanese support of the PSP killing the Vita's sales there), has sold 3.75 million as of recent reports; that's just a year (almost to the day) after the Japanese launch, and that's not counting the next two months of sales to reach its first year in the rest of the world. The Vita's only doing poorly because it's being compared to the 3DS - in its second year - and the single fastest-selling PlayStation product (the PSP). And even then, the 3DS is only selling all that well because it is following Nintendo's cheap business strategy of releasing multiple versions of the same thing and selling them as "New" so that people will jump on the new one. (Mind you, I love Nintendo, and the strategy does make sense from a business standpoint. I'm still extremely pissed that they announced the 3DSXL literally a week after Miyamoto flat-out said they weren't going to be selling new upgrades to the 3DS like they'd done with the DSLite/i/iXL.) The Vita isn't doing as well as Sony would like (but they'd like it to be better than the PSP, which won't happen if they can't get Capcom to put Monster Hunter on it), but it's got a really good future ahead of it, no matter what all the doom-and-gloom articles will say. Good support, not much shovelware, Cross-Buy, a possible price cut for memory sticks in the near future (at least I've heard this rumor going around recently, no word on if it's true or not yet), etc. Without much success in its bread-and-butter region for sales, it's STILL competing with the 3DS Y1 sales. Whether the Vita will get the same sales boom as the 3DS in Y2 is unknown yet, but it's safe to say it's not going to bomb like everyone keeps trying to say.

I agree 100%, i've been saying the same thing all over the place in the numerous articles that spout this same junk. The Vita hasn't been out as long and hasn't established a library yet, before the 3DS got its price break it didn't have much of a library either. Black Ops Declassified didn't suck because it was on the Vita, it sucked because the company is lazy about ports. Look at all the terrible ports they've put out to the Wii and DS, they treated the Vita only slightly better. And saying Assassin's Creed Liberation is a disappointment is ridiculous, every time someone speaks of disappointment they say in comparison to the CONSOLE AC games, they all say its better than any portable entry released so far so maybe its just a matter of ridiculous expectations (such expectations don't exist for the 3DS which is really only marginally better than the DS) I don't even have a Vita yet and I already have more games lined up for it than my 3DS (last game i bought for that was Mario Kart 7) Predicting doom just seems like a tactic to grab readers, its the gaming journalism equivalent of a nightly news health scare ("is your coffee killing you? tune in at 11") Viva La Vita

spot on. The vita seems to be getting a lot of this sensationalist journalism because of just how well its competitor is doing at the moment. Seriously the 3DS's lifetime sales in Japan are already greater than that of the PS3's, almost anything compared to that is going to look bad. And why don't any of these pieces take other regions that aren't japan into account? because the vita isn't actually doing that bad worldwide. The same week the 3DS outsold vita 46-1 in japan thanks to a recent release of a major game, worldwide the system only outsold the vita 6-1 and in the latest week it was only 3-1 which isn't that bad. The vita could still be doing much better which is the purpose of the article, but if the system had a 3DS level price cut as well as the memory cards getting a 50% price cut and some more recognised brands like god of war, grand theft auto, metal gear solid, final fantasy and so on then it could easily outperform the psp's lifetime sales I think and maybe catch up a bit with the 3DS.

This is going to sound unrelated at first and there will be a lot of digression, I warn you: I really wish I could support the 3DS more from a gamer standpoint, but I simply can't. I was really excited for its launch lineup when it was announced back in that February or whenever issue of GameInformer, and that the memory on each cartridge was now 4GB. It really had me, as well as a friend of mine, sold. However, I started seeing through the guise as the launch neared; once I realized that the 3DS was just a marginal upgrade a la DS Lite, I dropped off entirely and focused on console gaming instead. My friend decided to buy the 3DS because he felt the launch lineup would be good, but ended up only having OoT3D for the first few months of launch. To this day he only has maybe three games for it, and he doesn't touch it more than once every few months. Now, I'm not going to say that the Vita is necessarily "better" for fear of coming off as a Sony fanboy, but what I've seen so far from it is definitely more of what I expected from a new handheld than the 3DS (compared to their respective predecessors). The GBA to the DS was a huge jump, one you should have with a generational jump; the PSV took that jump from the PSP, but Nintendo, I feel, got complacent and decided to make the DS5 and 6, rather than something that is actually worth that ~$250 launch price that they initially had. Anyway, though the 3DS is undoubtedly a success, I feel this sort complacency is what will lead to the inevitable failure of the Wii U (and it will fail; I have good reason to believe so and can elaborate on request). Nintendo to me seems like it's been off for the past few years, almost as if they expect to have the success they've had last gen no matter what. It concerns me that Sony has got a legitimately better product than Nintendo in the handheld market, because Nintendo SHOULD have that market locked down as they always have. Fiscally, they may still have it locked down, but 25 million shipments doesn't mean much when nobody buys the software and many people trade it back in. I hope Nintendo shows some more care in this next few months, because this concern has been growing, and I don't want to see Nintendo in this kind of state; that's something I expect from Microsoft. (GraphicRogue, this was intended as a reply to your comment about the 3DS games you have in comparison to what you want for the Vita. In fact, while I'm here, I'll bring up a bit of research I did earlier this year: After looking at a comprehensive list of games for both handhelds in their first years, the Vita came out with nearly double the must-buy games as the 3DS, and that was before I'd counted Gravity Rush and some other shockers. Now given, the 3DS did gain a LOT of must-buy titles in its 13th and 14th months, but the point was that the Vita has so much more worthy software than the 3DS.)

That's the whole point, though. It DOESN'T have a 3DS level price cut. The memory cuts haven't been cut that much in price. Recognisable brands on Vita are almost nowhere to be found. It's still being outsold by at least 2:1 whichever you try to skew the statistics. Worldwide or region by region, the PSvita is losing in every domestic market. Sony outsold the competition by a similar ratio with the PS2 so they are feeling the same hurt as Microsoft and Nintendo did back when the Xbox and Gamecube were around. Personally, I think it's testament to the idea that competing in terms of the latest beefy technology doesn't necessarily work anymore (in fact, it has never worked in the games industry).

Paladin, I knew figures would back up game quality versus quantity in favor of the Vita. The 3DS is interesting but not revolutionary and its social aspects are better geared toward a population density like japan. Walked around my entire college campus with Street Pass on and found 3 people. I also think that these doomsday articles are failing to take into account the impact of digital games between the two. The 3DS is barely embracing digital distribution, only really dealing in demos of recent games, overpriced GB games or fluff DSiware. Vita is made to take full advantage of digital distribution with digital versions of brand new games available same day and actually cheaper (as digital versions should be) as well as a large back library of PSP and PS1 games. The only stumbling point there is the proprietary memory cards being overpriced due to a monopoly, system price isn't that bad but memory cards do need to drop if they want to better market it as a digital capable device. They are in a good position to appeal to indie developers with their handheld system without the same kind of restrictiveness of Apple or even Xbox Live Arcade. Sony can't really claim digital sales toward PS Vita because some can be PSP or PS3 playable but their not getting spanked as badly as people are making it out to be. 3DS gathers dust til something significant comes out (a portable Smash Bros with decent online/local multiplayer and they can brag)