It's hilarious how Sony try and palm it off on just the "climate". Public interest in handhelds has gone down, nobody can deny it. But Nintendo saw that too, and did everything in their power to stem the tide.
Sony basically rolled over, tossed out a few ports and called it a day.
Sony does not have the toolbox that Nintendo does. Even in dark times, Nintendo can throw a Pokemon or Mario Kart at a system and expect millions of new customers to immediately and consistently show up; that does not happen with a Gran Turismo or Uncharted.
Again, I'm not arguing that (Memory Card Pricing} was THE reason. It just wasn't a net-positive, and it was a deterrent on some level, both to the mass market and to owners to invest greater in the PSN ecosystem. To what extent, again, cannot be quantified. I just disagree that it can be outright dismissed.
Perhaps. It's certainly GAF users' biggest reason for not buying, I'm constantly seeing threads about people who know countless other people who
almost bought one and then looked at the Memory Card prices.
Personally, I believe it was pretty close to a non-factor for the vast majority of potential customers; they never even bothered to look at Vita Memory Card prices because they never took a good look at the Vita. Not the right software for them, not the right price for hardware or software, not something they felt they needed because they never touch their other portable game consoles, not a platform they needed when they had a brand new kick-ass PS4, not important to them when they've already got a cellphone that can play games that they don't play games on. If they even got as far as thinking of reasons why not, they had plenty of reasons (in their minds, at least; for me the platform fit my needs and expectations just fine) to turn away with just a glance.
Vita as a device is good enough for 7-10 years. too bad they stopped supporting it.
You mean as far as market opportunity or tech? Because as far as the hardware, Vita was unfortunately never going to be able to keep up with the insane explosion of mobile specs, even at launch it was running against some powerful devices (at 3X the price before subsidization) and then after that its only chance was to get the high-budget investment that mobile games rarely get (because nobody wants to try hard to sell a game for $0, and F2P doesn't demand you try hard, just that you play mean with the suckers.) Vita supposedly never went well with Unreal Engine 3 (I don't hear quite as much frustration from Unity, but then again, Unity developers aren't kicking all their games over like one would wish so something's in the way,) it didn't have the headroom to make it easy for PS3 ports (or spin-offs using familiar PS3 engines, although hot-damn did Killzone Mercenary make me want more,) and it's only going to fall further behind as it goes on. It's still strong and familiar to develop for, so PS4/Vita co-productions seem to be working out okay where the PS4 game is modestly produced, but it was always impossible to have beast-level hardware for a generation like PSP.
Personally, i also think that the answer that was given about the climate implies that they (Sony) dont think that they can do anything to really make such an investment worthwhile. If they truly believed in turning the tide, i'm sure that they would have made another attempt at it.
That's true. Better that they tell the truth than hem and haw and pretend that it's still a "very important market with a lot of opportunities for the future." Vita is what it is, Sony's not pretending they've got a plan C to bring it back.
Losing Monster Hunter hurt, but what hurt the most was stopping piracy. Piracy was no doubt the biggest reason they sold as many PSP systems they did, because it was a cinch to do.
If PSP was locked down, it wouldn't have done nearly as well as it did. So with Vita you have another Sony handheld, but one that lacks some of the bigger name exclusives PSP had, plus the ability to download them for free.
Oh, now that's interesting ... infamy is still fame, and fame breeds success. I agree with that assessment, as panic-inducing as the piracy problem was for PSP, it put PSP in people's minds that had never considered it before, much moreso than could be said for God of War GoS or Motorstorm AE or Dissidia or many of the awesome PSP games that never set fire to the sales charts.