PlayStation Vita Japan Direct Tonight

PSP wasn’t ever really successful though.

Still though, no one in the press or the industry thought Nintendo would win the handheld war with the DS. I’ve heard at least two press guys (Micheal Pachter, surprise surprise, and Shane Satterfield, who actually wrote an article on Gamespot, although I can’t find it) say that they thought that the PSP would kill Nintendo, and they figured that everyone thought so.
The PSP entered the handheld market with absolute certainty that it would beat Nintendo. That didn’t happen. Not that the PSP was a bad system, but with such high expectations, it’s hard not see it as a failure.

My god someone is taking this way too personally. Calm down, child.

The PSP was a moderate success in Japan. Yes, it has issues, even there, piracy being one of the largest. But taking the PSP total sales and comparing them to other countries isn’t telling the whole story. The PSP has outsold the PS3 in its home country. Software sales for PSP games are much higher in Japan. Even anectdotally, during my visit there, there were almost as many PSPs as there were 3DS’s. It was outsold by the DS. That’s a fact. That wasn’t supposed to be the case, looking at the initial hardwares. In fact, Nintendo didn’t fully commit to the DS themselves, another fact. They initially touted it as a “third pillar”, which is partly why it dropped the game boy moniker. In that regard, no the PSP didn’t do quite as well as expected. But saying that it didn’t do well is a fallacy which would be skewed by the relatively lackluster sales outside of Japan. The volume may have been lower, but the market is smaller.

I will admit that my comment was a tad snarky, which I will, rightfully apologize for.

I can see the perception = reality argument, and by that node, the PSP has had more than its fair share of problems. The piracy issue is one of the biggest, especially factoring in that UMDs are a very flawed medium to put games on.

My main rebuttal would be that handheld sales matter worldwide, but I’d almost count Japan as doubly important, sale for sale, when you’re referring to the handheld market. Japan lives on the handheld market and for good reason. Space is at a premium, and there’s average of a 1 hour commute for most people daily. I know that seems extremely arbitrary, but the 3DS’s and PSPs outsell the home consoles 2-1 every week, and software sales reflect that. I’m pretty sure the current perception of the PSP was closer to my view of a moderate success than the failure it has been in the US, relatively speaking.

It’s kind of like the Visual Novel genre. Internationally, the genre is tiny, barely a blip on most people’s radars. However, game developers that make Visual Novels know that Japan loves them, so while their worldwide sales aren’t likely to be great, in the only region they matter, they will probably do pretty well. Handhelds are very similar. There’s the view that they may be a dying breed in the US, but in Japan, the market is still very large.

Memory cards are the real issue.

Oh. Don’t get me started on those.

I was shocked when I saw the prices of those things. $100 for a 32 GB memory card? Are you kidding me, Sony? I bought a 32 GB SD card for less than 1/4 that price.

The only way I can see anyone getting a vita with that price point is if they bought one of the bundles since those come with a memory card included at no extra charge, but even that is a hard sell since those memory cards have only 4 GB of storage.

Well, you sure got lucky.

I hope that the microSD shells do go in to production. It would certainly be more affordable than the current ones. Although, you have to wonder how tiny the actual cards will be. The regular memory cards are small enough on their own. Imagine trying to fit the even smaller cards in to those shells.