Ten Years On, I Still Love The PlayStation Vita

thegamer.com:

Ten years ago today the PlayStation Vita launched in Japan. Over 300,000 people bought Sony's premium handheld, but after that initial burst of success there was a sharp drop-off. In the second week its sales dipped by 78% and never recovered. From a business perspective this made the Vita a failure. But as a system it was anything but. In fact, the Vita is one of Sony's greatest consoles, even though it took a while for it to discover its true purpose.

The Vita's big launch game was Uncharted: The Golden Abyss, which was Sony's way of saying: look, you can play proper games on this thing. Games with cutscenes and lavish 3D graphics and high production values, but portable! It was a decent attempt to squeeze a Nathan Drake adventure into ahandheld, but ultimately misunderstood the unique strengths of the system. Games like this just didn't fit on a console designed to be played in short bursts.

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Sony's rival at the time was Nintendo, whose 3DS was taking the handheld market by storm. That's why it went all-in on Uncharted: not just to piggyback on a popular IP, but to show that the Vita could run games the 3DS could only dream of. Vita versions of Assassin's Creed and Call of Duty followed, but it wasn't enough to shift consoles. People didn't want big, expensive console-style games on a handheld, and it killed the console's momentum.

In Japan, things were looking bleak for the Vita. Predictably, dreary Western games like Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed didn't capture Japanese gamers' imaginations. But the worst blow of all was Capcom's decision to release the next Monster Hunter exclusively for the 3DS. This series had almost