Poor Vita. A great piece of portable hardware whose potential success was undermined by bad timing, poor decision-making within Sony, laughably exorbitant memory card prices, and more.
I remember how excited for Vita I was after Sony unveiled it at E3 in 2011. It looked like the portable that could pose a serious challenge to Ninten-dominance. 3DS and Vita were slated to be the same price. The games looked pretty good. Significant third-party publishers were on board.
Then the bottom fell out.
Nintendo slashed the price of the 3DS, making Sony's unit suddenly seem expensive by comparison... and Sony was in no position to make a pricing move. Proprietary memory cards were required, and they were stupidly-expensive. While Uncharted and Call of Duty games would come to the Vita, they were helmed by lesser development teams and wound up being lesser quality experiences.
Retailers never gave Vita a ton of space, and what little space it did get gradually eroded. They didn't seem to have much confidence in the Vita-- and Sony's poor marketing and messaging leading up to the platform's release certainly didn't help. "Vita? What's that?" was the "WiiU? What's that?" of the first half of 2012.
I finally got a Vita as a gift for Christmas last year. I want to love it more than I do, but memory card space is super-tight and the device's shitty Internet connectivity makes downloading a chore when I do feel the urge to buy anything. Buying physical cards is a bit tough since many retailers locally don't carry much more than 3-4 games, while GameStop seems to have either new (and expensive) games or the same dozen used games at every location. It sits on my nightstand less than two months later, serving as a dust collector. I don't have the heart to sell it because it was a gift... so it just kind of exists.
I do think that Vita deserved a better fate. It's great that it has a ravenous (though tiny) fanbase that does its best to support what games do still come out for it. I just wonder what might have been if Sony made better decisions and if AAA publishers had a bit more confidence in it.