It feels like they are trying to doom this thing right out of the gate. They tried hard to doom the PSP but it survived in spite of Sony’s lack of US support.
I’ve seen almost no advertising on mainstream television for the system or it’s games.
They should have cut the cost by dumping the extra shit that no one is really going to use. Back touch panel. 3G (who is paying for a data plan for there Vita??). Multiple cameras.
They didn’t seem to go out of their way to make sure there was a must have property on launch day (CoD or some other huge game). Having a must play game in the launch window is crucial to building momentum and causing more impulse buys by cash fat adult gamers. Yeah, Uncharted is big but probably not enough to make anyone go out and buy a new system to play it. I heard a CoD game is going to release this year. They should have had that ready for launch. People would go ape shit for a fully realized CoD in HD with Dual Analog controls.
The price of proprietary memory cards. AGAIN. Jesus Christ. How many times is Sony going to do this??? There is no need for proprietary cards to begin with.
Downloadable versions of retail games cost the same as going to Gamestop and buying it there. WTF? Why not give a 10-15% discount for buying direct from the PSN since there is almost no overhead there.
I’ve seen almost no advertising. And it launches formally in 2 days.
I do plan on buying one, mainly because I really liked my PSP and, though there weren’t a ton of blockbusters on it, the games that were great were worth owning the system for.
I used to work for the studio that made Uncharted for the Vita. I quit, though, because it was clear even back then that all we’d ever work on would be more handheld games- and Sony has the worst marketing team ever. Seriously- the game I worked on had a MetaCritic score of 9.7… but nobody ever heard of it, because Sony marketing didn’t want to spend money advertising it.
From what I’ve seen, the back touch panel is extremely cool and well-implemented. As for multiple cameras, I can’t imagine them costing all that much money.
You almost need to have 3G connectivity and both front and back facing cameras these days in any portable device.
I’d actually be questioning Sony’s commitment to profitability if they didn’t include those features.
As for the games lineup, meh. Most systems don’t have an impressive slew of launch titles. Nintendo tends to try to have them, but it’s not really been a high priority for every system. I recall each generation of PlayStation consoles had a relatively disappointing selection of titles at launch.
And the Penny Arcade guys did a strip about buying Uncharted a week before the Vita was released, so that’s bound to be good for at least a few sales.
They seem to have done ok with advertising, though. $50 million buys a lot of ad space, though I admit I’m probably in the target demo and have seen more Vita ads over the internet than the average American.
I’ll agree about the memory cards. Sony has a bad history of doing this, but they’ve always gotten away with it. There’s no reason to change until it’s obviously they have to. The whole mess with the UMD was a perfect example. They backed off of that pretty quick when it was obviously so unpopular.
We’ve got a Vita Hill Social Club here in scenic Cambridge Massachusetts, so, setting aside the “WTF is this weird storefront space?” phenomenon, they appear to be trying to advertise in uh, new and different ways.
Not really convinced that paying a ton of money for expensive TV ads is the best use of your marketing dollars when trying to sell a shiny new game system. This isn’t a toy for kids here people, this is something that is clearly being marketed towards gamers who will be buying it on their own dime.
While I have my own share of questions that could be lumped under the heading of “What the hell is Sony doing with the Vita?” (Such as “Why are they making a super expensive HD handheld device when the data points to the fact that previous generation handheld devices were successful almost entirely because they were cheap to acquire and cheap to develop for, neither of which will be true of this platform?”) none of the points raised by **Cubsfan **are on the list. Not even the proprietary memory card thing, because the answers to that are so obvious (As stated previously in this thread.).
What gets me about the proprietary memory cards is that it will work against them for various reasons. In addition to the general backlash/holy-cow-these-are-expensive-and-not-worth-buying, the cost provides a disincentive to buy games. Uncharted tracks at close to 3.2 GB - at that rate you’d need a new 4GB card for every game (or buy a larger card, which are much more expensive per GB than the smaller ones)
I do plan to get one, but I am waiting to see if there’s a price drop - most of my play will be Madden 13, which won’t be out until August.
For my PSP, someone came out with a converter which allows me to use MicroSD cards in the Memory Stick slot. If that shows up for the Vita that will help, as I’m not too eager to spend $99 for the biggest memory card (32 GB, I think), but want at least that much memory.
I was going to post this same thing. I’m not in the target audience (my last console is an N64). I guess if they aren’t also advertising on ESPN or MTV or Hulu then yeah, they are lousy marketers.
Not long after the PSP came out, my dad won one in a drawing and gave it to me. It proved to be worth exactly what I paid for it. The selection of games was never very deep or good. They seem to be following the same general path to failure with Vita. Unless somebody gives me one for free, I’m not interested.
I’ve not really been researching it, since the last game console I bought was a PS2 and I’ve gotten much more into PC gaming since then, but I thought the Vita was supposed to just be a portable PS3 and would basically be linking back to it to play whatever game you had in your console at the time. Did I misunderstand the commercials?
Yup. I think they have some interactivity planned in the future, but nothing like what you describe. It’s a typical handheld console that runs its own games.
See, just from background noise commercials, that I haven’t paid attention to, it looked like you played at home on the PS3, then could continue when you left the house.
I was under the exact same misconception from the commercials, and I am well within the target audience for this device. That’s some serious miscommunication, there. I wonder if it was intentional.
Then the commercial is VERY misleading. They show a guy playing a game, then pausing it, downloading it to his PS Vita, and taking it on the bus.
I thought they were trying to compete with the new Nintendo system, where the controller is basically a handheld and you can keep playing the same games.
