Veni, Vidi, Vita

January 10th, 2012, 01:40 Posted By: wraggster

When Sony gets hardware right, Sony really gets hardware right. Recent years have brought us a torrent of sleek, weighty iDevices from Apple, all unibody aluminium and smoky black glass, so perhaps it's timely for us to get a reminder of just how great Sony's industrial design is when it's firing on all cylinders. PlayStation Vita just feels right, in a way that few other hardware companies ever quite manage. It's got enough weight to feel expensive and yet it's perfectly balanced in your hands. The sense of holding something powerful, something premium, is your first impression of Vita. Sony does it again.Or so you'd think. Personally, I think Vita is a wonderful piece of kit; Tom is head over heels in love with it. The nation of Japan, on the other hand, seems rather less enamoured. The tale of PS Vita's launch hasn't been the triumphant epic Sony wanted - instead, it's become a miserable little tale of trickling sales and an unconvinced public. Has Sony really miscalculated? Or is the gaming press, much of which has become so accustomed to putting the boot into Sony in recent years, exaggerating the situation?Taken in isolation, the figures don't look great. Sony planned to ship 700,000 units of Vita for the Japanese launch period (that doesn't necessarily mean day one, and we're not sure how quickly those units actually made it onto shelves), but by New Year's Day the company had only sold through around 440,000 of those to customers. This isn't quite the embarrassing level of over-supply that the PS3 saw at launch - but given that half a million of those consoles are special editions of the 3G model with a hundred hours of 3G data access thrown in for free, which Sony expected to be snapped up very rapidly, it's certainly not a great start.If we're looking for some context, the obvious place to look would be the launch of the original PSP - but that's not actually a very useful comparison, as it turns out. Vita sold about 325,000 units in its launch weekend, compared to 200,000 units of the PSP sold at launch in December 2004. That was a totally different kettle of fish, though - Sony only shipped 200,000 units of the PSP for the Japanese launch, and sold every single one it shipped. It's impossible to say how many more would have sold had there been more stock available, but it's worth remembering that the European launch of PSP ended up being delayed until the following September due to problems meeting demand in Japan and North America. With 160,000 units of Vita unsold in Japan as of January 1st, that seems unlikely to happen this time around.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...veni-vidi-vita

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