How many mobile games look better than what the Vita was putting out? Even today. CoD Mobile despite releasing 7 years after CoD Black Ops Declassified on Vita and having way better phone SoCs is barely an improvement.

The Switch still happily runs games off microSD cards. The home consoles didn't get SSDs till 2020. For Vita, the cards were fast enough. The problem was the proprietary nature of the cards. They just cost way too much for the size especially as time wore on. I think at the time I imported my 64GB Vita card, a microSD card of the same size was half the price. By the end of the Vita's life the 32GB card was laughably bad value.

> How many mobile games look better than what the Vita was putting out?

This is a surprisingly profound question, because the mobile people absolutely could do games that look better than that and largely found it is not worth doing so. It is partly tech, in that people prefer battery life (you also cannot spend more if your battery has run out), but also technical aspects of graphics simply don’t impress people as much as they did in the 90s. “Content”, and volumes of it, is far more important.

The Vita cards were fast enough but not big enough for games that the Sony demographic would want. For example, a Vita scale Gran Turismo or Metal Gear Solid entry is simply not going to improve on the (great) PSP entries.

By the time the Vita launched we had already been releasing Android builds for the Xperia Play which were straight up ports from the PSP, as betrayed by the almost uniform 1.6GB per game.

Edit: to add a concrete example, the developers of NBA Jam mobile (which was great) went back to 2D afterwards, and came up with a very nice engine for streaming 2D animation and a whole content pipeline system for using it. That ended up making huge amounts of money and entertained tens of millions of people for a long time.

Genshin Impact mobile is pretty much on par with PC/console versions, and Vita couldn't do anything even remotely close to it in terms of scale. Although games like Killzone and Uncharted definitely pushed the envelope in terms of what was possible with the Vita, really great games.

Back then, only a few from companies like Glu (now owned by EA as of 2021) and Gameloft (Aquired by Vivendi) even tried. The mobilew became night and day by the turn of the decade, though. If Vita had a game like Genshin, then maybe its fate (in Asia) wouldn't have been so dire.

But then again, Genshin was 8GB at launch. Definitely shouldn't underestimate how quick storage costs came down from 2012 to 2017 when the Switch launched. enabling larger games to casually be made.

People too often conflagrate performance of a plateform vs the games you can get on that platform. The Nintendo 3DS was released about the same time as the Vita. It and the "new 3DS" that came after it were huge for Nintendo, despite the hardware being far from state of the art (unless you count the 3D display that was more a gimmick than anything). You can say the same thing about the Switch. One of the Vita's biggest problems was Sony itself. Proprietary & expensive memory cards plus poor corporate support doomed the platform.

I have a hacked Vita Slim and it is wonderful. The size is great, the controls are great, and the homebrew scene is incredible. It really holds up.