http://kotaku.com/ps-vita/

I doubt anyone would care even if it was for consumers , the thing needs games badly and a price cut even more.

Yes but they still will not be able to compete with smart phones. Why spend a few hundred quid on a portable gaming console and then £20 plus on each game when you can get decent games for under a fiver for the phone?

TBH, there are few (in fact, none, to be honest) games on any smartphone I've seen that compete with a lot of the full price PS Vita games. There are playable games on phones certainly but there's nothing on any phone to match Wipeout 2048 or Gravity Rush or Uncharted : Golden Abyss. And there likely aren't ever going to be; given the way the phone market works, it doesn't make sense to make games of that grade for phones because you simply couldn't make a profit doing it. People expect phone games to be a few quid and you can't finance the development of a game like those on sales at a few quid each.

The question in fact is this : Are you happy enough with 'quite good' for a fiver, or would you prefer 'bloody excellent' for 25 quid? That's the choice phone vs Vita actually is. Obviously, for a lot of people 'quite good' is fine, so they do (and should) buy phones. But there are some people who want to pay extra for a Vita over a phone for the same reason there are some people who want to pay extra for a Panasonic TV over an LG one, or an Audi rather than a Ford. It's a legitimate market choice.

The thing we don't know is this : How many sales is Sony's business model built on? Did they expect Vita to compete toe to toe with the major smartphone brands in sales, or did they actually expect it to be a bit 'niche' and be bought mostly by the minority of people for whome phone games don't quite cut it?

Jon

I'm not sure that the gap between phone games and "proper" games has really changed much. Proper games are still 10x better for 10x the price.

If you go back to the days of the Gameboy, our phones had games on. For my Nokia in particular, I had a disk with hundreds of games to choose from. For me those games were enough to keep me amused on the only occasions I would ever play a portable game - ie waiting somewhere for something. At home, I've always gamed on the PC.

Obviously the Gameboy games were much superior and it sold extremely well. I bet a lot more people have played Snake though.

There are some great games like Infinity Blade 1 and 2; Nova 3; Air Supremacy and RealRacing2HD. Though these are few and far between. So yes the vita has more games but the price difference for the occasional player is too much. As for the market choice I am not denying you that, but it does mean that it is a niche. As an occasional mobile games player I do not see the need for me to get a Vita even if the games are better.

One thing I rarely see mentioned in the Phone/Tablet vs Handheld debate is, 'did the rise of the home console weaken handhelds?'

Seriously, there's been quite some jump from the 'geeky' console sales of the 80s and 90s, and Nintendo brought in females of all ages.

I would not have thought so. The iPhone is now around 5 years old and it brought in many more developers. That plus the iPod Touch probably were the death knell for mobile handhelds. Android just added to that pressure. Consoles getting cheaper might have had some impact. When a console is only £50 more expensive than a mobile handheld it makes sense to use a console instead, especially when the games are cheaper and can be bought second hand.

I think the case for mobile phone games is incredibly overstated; there's anecdotal evidence that the sales figures for anything but the top games are shocking, and I doubt anyone's living comfortably off the ad money from a game that's miles down the screen and a rip-off of another game to boot. Just as an aside,

http://www.vg247.com/2013/02/08/infinit ... ng-closed/

Also, the 3DS got sales when they realised the price was laughable; it all depends on the frequency and quality of games. And even the PS3 caught up on the Xbox

There may be other factors that could be responsible. Portable games consoles had a big price jump from the Gameboy Advance to those of the Playstation.