>I think just letting it die was a consequence of the then-widely-held view that handheld gaming, and maybe all dedicated console gaming, was sure to be killed by the smartphone.
They were right in many regards. The casual gaming audience disappeared in real time over gen 8 to phones. Even the 3DS just did "well" as a result. So sony went all in on the PS4 and Nintendo converged handheld and console to stand out.
It's coming around again now, but through emulators (Analog Pocket and various android handhelds), the blooming market of handheld PCs (Steam Deck, GPD, Aya, etc.), and the occasional novelty device aiming for small markets (Playdate, Gameshell). I don't know if we'll ever get another handheld like the Vita with its balance of power, build, and library.
> They were right in many regards. The casual gaming audience disappeared in real time over gen 8 to phones. Even the 3DS just did "well" as a result.
Exactly. Smartphone games were clearly the reason why Vita+3DS sold much worse than PSP+DS. The Vita failed because the market wasn't large enough anymore to support two systems, and the 3DS had more exclusive franchises.
I don't even think smartphone games were the killer, just smartphones in general. The audience isn't looking for specifically for gaming; they're looking for entertainment in their pocket. With smartphones that can be YouTube/Netflix/Facebook/etc. Those are good enough that you don't need games.
Okay but that possibility would also predict that gaming in general would go down, not just on PS Vita and 3DS. It's true that the overall PC market shrunk (smartphones could replace PCs for many people) but I don't think the home console market was affected.
It may have been? It's a much more complicated story. Consoles haven't decreased, but they have notably stagnated for the past decade in terms of sales. Gaming overall only goes up because the mobile market surged to parity with consoles (in terms of revenue) over the 2010's.
But I doubt that was due to phones. It's more factors like set top boxes, "smart" TV's with built in streaming apps and casting, and the decline of the need for DVD/blu-ray players.
I remember the days of the PS3 where many bought it simply because it was the cheapest Blu-ray player (which is saying something, given its slow adoption rate and infamous "599 USD" reputation), but consoles as a multimedia device has definitely fallen off. It's also infamously one of the worst market reads in the industry when Xbox One decided in 2013 to advertise as a set top box on its reveal over a gaming console.
But unlike handhelds, that lost "non-gaming" market did get made up for with a growing market of dedicated gamers (indicated by games continuing to sell increasing numbers of copies). So it simply evened out instead of trending downwards.
They could have compensated the way Nintendo did for so long, releasing games as late as 2019 for the 3DS - making good exclusive games people would actually want to play.
Sony never really cracked the code of putting out good content at the consistency of Nintendo. Even though they managed to put out a handful of gems over the years, they just don't seem to know how to leverage it. And in the past few years they seem to want to actively undermine whatever they had, disbanding Sony Japan Studio, and they've floundered, spending the entirety of the PS5's life remastering PS4 games that didn't need a remaster. And sitting on Bloodborne all these years, while it's still stuck at 30fps...
They were right in many regards. The casual gaming audience disappeared in real time over gen 8 to phones. Even the 3DS just did "well" as a result. So sony went all in on the PS4 and Nintendo converged handheld and console to stand out.
It's coming around again now, but through emulators (Analog Pocket and various android handhelds), the blooming market of handheld PCs (Steam Deck, GPD, Aya, etc.), and the occasional novelty device aiming for small markets (Playdate, Gameshell). I don't know if we'll ever get another handheld like the Vita with its balance of power, build, and library.