Industry analyst Colin Sebastian from RW Baird doesn’t have the same level of faith in the PlayStation Vita as Sony. With only 1.8 million units sold as of March 2012, Sebastian doesn’t believe that Sony will be able to reach their target of 10 million sales by the end of the 2013 fiscal year.
In an interview with GamesIndustry, the analyst said that the company’s goal of 10 million sales is a bit of a “stretch” when considering the current state of the handheld business and the rising popularity of smartphone gaming.
10 million looks like a stretch goal at this point. Perhaps there is a price cut baked into that guidance later in the year, or Sony believe that there are titles such as Call of Duty for Vita that will be meaningful platform drivers.
Vita is a great dedicated game device, but the market for those products continues to shrink as smart devices become better platforms for games.
The CEO of Panoptic Management Consultants, Asif Khan shared similar thoughts, saying that unless Sony plans to drop the price, the Vita is going to suffer sales-wise over the coming months. With Nintendo’s 3DS rising in popularity, Sony has to change things up if they want to compete.
I am not surprised that the Vita is having such sluggish sales as their launch lineup was nothing to write home about and the price point of the device is too high. With Wii U coming out this fall and 3DS sales gaining momentum, the 10 million unit sales target seems a little too optimistic.
The best thing Sony could do to spur Vita sales would be to lower the price of the device.
While it is highly unlikely that we’ll see Sony drop the price of the Vita at this year’s E3, you can count on them debuting a bunch of new software for the platform.
