Sometimes the technology used in a product is so advanced that even its rivals cannot help but be impressed. While in Paris promoting a 3DS-powered visitor’s guide for the Louvre, Nintendo superstar Shigeru Miyamoto could not help but express his praise for the Sony PlayStation Vita’s technological capabilities. Of course, the legendary game designer found another way to criticize the machine.

Miyamoto says he finds the handheld’s software lineup ultimately unsatisfying. “[The Vita is] obviously a very hi-spec machine, and you can do lots of things with it,” he said. “But I don’t really see the combination of software and hardware that really makes a very strong product.”

The Vita was released in Japan last December in Japan and late February for the US, UK and Australia. Despite selling 325,000 units after its release date in Japan and 600,000 in other regions, sales of the handheld have slumped. In Europe both the Wii and PlayStation Portable—the handheld the Vita was supposed to replace—outsell Sony’s new console.  Sales in the United States are more positive. There only the PlayStation3, Xbox 360 and 3DS outsell it, with the Vita slowly catching up to the 3DS in weekly sales.

In Japan, though, the 3DS is trouncing the Vita, outselling it 10:1. This is in spite of a slow start for the Nintendo handheld, which only picked up after a price drop for the 3DS. Miyamoto blames the poor initial sales on a lack of games available at launch.

“When we launched the 3DS hardware we didn’t have Super Mario 3D Land, we didn’t have Mario Kart 7, we didn’t have Kid Icarus: Uprising,” he said. “We were striving to have all of these ready for the launch, but we weren’t able to deliver them at that time. We were kind of hoping that people would, nevertheless, buy into the product, find 3DS hardware promising, but looking back we have to say we realise the key software was missing when we launched the hardware.”

The solution to Sony’s problems, then, is more games with maybe a price drop, and few Vita owners would disagree. Despite a collection of launch title representing a wide range of genres, the trickle of games released has slowly dried up. Gravity Rush is the next big game due for release in the United States and Europe, coming out in mid-June.

Little support from publishers proved to be the bane of the PlayStation Portable. Although its sales were not abysmal, compared to its competition, the DS, they left something to be desired .

So will more games solve the Vita’s problems? At this point Sony may need to more than just that and to drop the Vita’s pricey retail value of $249, in order to see significant changes in sales. It worked for the 3DS, so a change in price may make the Vita victorious.

Image Courtesy of   Ricardo “Eb” Trejo

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Historically, Nintendo’s GameBoy consoles have always defined the handheld gaming experience. Intermittent efforts from Sega and Sony over the years have been unable to unseat Nintendo as the king of handhelds.

According to the latest sales figures from Sony, the PS Vita has surpassed 1.2 million units sold worldwide, despite an unenthusiastic reception in Sony’s home country of Japan.

In Europe, first week sales of the PS Vita outsold Nintendo’s new handheld console, the 3DS. In the United States and Japan, however, first-week sales figures for the Vita lagged behind other handheld gaming consoles of the current and previous generations.

The 3DS sold seven times as many units as the PS Vita worldwide last week. 3DS games have also sold well, making up 7 of the top 10 best-selling games of the previous week.

Nintendo’s perennial success with handhelds has had a massive effect on the platform as a whole. Of the top five best-selling handheld consoles of all time, four of them are made by Nintendo. Gamers who play handhelds have come to expect a certain experience, and this experience has been almost entirely defined by Nintendo’s vision.

The PS Vita also has its own strong vision for itself. It is meant to be the home console experience in your hands, with a large, high-definition screen and graphics comparable to the home experience. And this, possibly, is where it went wrong: It’s stepping on too many toes at once.

For the cost of a PS Vita (about $300 USD), you could buy an actual home console. And because the Vita requires a memory card made by Sony, that only works with the Vita, for an addition $100, you could probably find a Nintendo DS on the cheap for that price as well.

Handheld gamers do not expect, and quite possibly are not even enticed by, the ability to play home console games on a handheld system. The most popular handheld games by far are iOS games, which are often quick, shallow, and addictive. Even GameBoy and DS games are largely episodic, with frequent opportunities to quit and come back later.

Console games, on the other hand, are meant for prolonged play. To try to fit a full console experience into an intrinsically stop-and-go format is at worst a misjudgement of the nature and appeal of the platform.

At best, it suits a very particular, perhaps European, demographic. If you do not have the space in your apartment for a home entertainment system, and use trains or busses more often than a car to get from place to place, being able to experience console gaming in a handheld format could have appeal.

Taking into consideration, however, that the largest gaming markets are in the United States and Japan, the Vita seems poorly thought through. For now, gamers who want a home console experience still prefer to play on an actual home console. Add to that the exorbitant price tag of the Vita, its aesthetically unimpressive OS, and the additional hidden cost of a proprietary memory stick, and the Vita seems to be stepping on its own toes as well.

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