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SONY MAY KILL OFF PS VITA IN LIGHT OF SLUMPING SALES
January 5 2012
Tokyo, Japan - Back in 2004 the gaming world was a different altogether from what it is today. Games were popular, raking in billions of dollars a year, but they still had not gone mainstream. Yes, people would lay computer solitaire or minesweeper but that, for the most part, was it. Now just about everyone plays games, whether robust
complex titles on expensive hardware or cheap and even free simple titles on their phone or Facebook account. More people than ever are playing games, yet games are starting to suffer.
In particular, two of the giants are starting to slow. Back in 2004 those two titans, Sony and Nintendo, set themselves up to do battle in the handheld realm, a world the latter had controlled for decades. Out of the gate, Nintendo fumbled and Sony soared, and then things changed, dramatically, leaving Nintendo with the best selling handheld ever and Sony with a lot of egg on its face.
2011 was to be yet another handheld battleground with both companies releasing new hardware, but sales have fallen short of expectations. While Nintendo has managed, the recent release of the new Sony machine, the PlayStation Vita has been a disaster with sales plummeting after a fairly successful launch, numbers which may prompt Sony to just kill the machine after only a couple of weeks on the market.
“It’s pretty bad, much worse than we ever could have imagined it would have been. We knew the market was changing and that people had gotten used to really cheap games on hardware they already owned, but we figured that wasn’t really going to be an obstacle. Obviously, we were wrong,” said a Sony insider. “The drop is huge and doesn’t bode well for the future of the machine. We aren’t at the stage where we will pull it from market quite yet, but we are getting there. It’s just too expensive to keep making it if people aren’t going to buy it. We like to see full shelves in stores, but not all the time.”
The Vita sold 325,000 units in the first 48 hours, and then a little over 72,000 the following week, numbers which really haven’t improved since. The Nintendo 3DS did better in both areas when it launched earlier this year.
Much of the blame for the lack of sales has been placed at high price point, boring software, and no one really being interested in buying the machine anyways.
“It’s a bad situation. It remains to be seen how things will go over in North America, if
it even makes it out here, but if the numbers in Japan are any indicator it may well be that the handheld market is over and that these companies just need to step out entirely. Generally when people aren’t even remotely interested in buying things the sales go down,” said Scrape TV Gaming analyst Graeme Hawthorne. “I mean that’s a rule with pretty much every consumer product. People tend to not buy things when they aren’t interested in them and that results in poor sales for the manufacturer, and that appears to be what has happened with the Vita. I mean they had those initial sales, but those people will likely be happy just spending money on something other than Mountain Dew. It appears this is the start of the end of an era.”
Nintendo was reportedly mildly amused by the sales numbers.
Douglas Havermore, Games Correspondent
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