The Playstation Vita is Doing Poorly in Japan

After selling 325,000 units on the first 2 days of its launch (Dec. 17 & 18), the Vita has since sold half of that. Through December 19th to January 15th, Sony sold just 176,000 units. Last week (9th to 15th), the Vita sold an amazingly paltry 42,915 units, despite the Vita having a very impressive launch lineup. In that same 7 day period, the Nintendo 3DS outsold the Vita by a 5:1 ratio and the original PSP sold 4,000 units. No Vita games were in the top 20 games sold in Japan since the Vita's launch, but numbers currently only track retail copies and not digital downloads.


It's still early in this portable cycle, but it looks Nintendo may have already won. When Sony announced the price of the Vita it was going to be the same price as the 3DS, but before the Vita could launch, Nintendo lowered the price by nearly $100. Sony did not make a similar decision and they also made the very unwise decision to announce that the PS Vita would use a proprietary external saving device that would only be used by the Vita, similar to the memory cards of consoles of olde, sold at double the price of SD cards with the same amount of memory. The 3DS uses traditional SD cards and comes packaged with one.


Lowering the price of the handheld won't be enough for Sony. They're going to need to lower the price of their memory cards as well, because if you really expect people to download all their games, they won't pay $150 just so they don't have to purchase physical copies. Sony has seriously set back digital distribution by their idiotic decision to price their memory cards as such, and the consumers are letting Sony know.