I think at $100 less the Vita would be doing 2-3x better than it is now, but Creepy Old Guy is right (if we cut around some of the language he uses due to be diddled by Shigsy when he was a child): there's no audience for the Vita in North America. We don't even need to include the "manchildren" here, because they're such a small slice of the pie in NA they're almost insignificant. Handheld gaming hardware in NA has almost exclusively been the province of children. The PSP and the DS were both good at hitting demographics outside that, but neither the adolescent to adult male gamer of the PSP nor the soccer mom/elderly demo of the DS proved to yield much in the way of consistent long-term fruit.
That made it extremely baffling to me when Sony opted to target the same group again with the Vita. I really don't know what they were expecting to happen there.
The WiiU baffles me to a similar extent. We've seen with the Wii that the expanded audience Nintendo successfully courted with the Wii didn't really stick it out for the long haul, though they certainly proved lucrative while they were there. You could say Nintendo would be happy if the exact same situation as the Wii happened again, and I'd agree, but the problem is that Nintendo isn't targeting a fresh new audience with the WiiU - rather, they seem to be doubling down on the latter years of the Wii, which is to say, the Nintendo faithful and the largely disinterested people they pulled in with Wii Sports and Wii Fit. I don't see how that's a viable plan at all, outside Japan, where the Nintendo faithful can hold up the entire island in the event it's necessary.
I really think Nintendo is targeting the 360 audience. I mean, you can laugh at it, but it is what it is. I mean, look at the Pro Controller. They're throwing out Nintendo Land but they're not really pushing it like they expect it to be Wii Sports take two. A lot of their focus is on PS360 ports.
I'd say in general, Nintendo knows they've lost the casuals, and casual gaming hasn't been a big focus of their presentation terminology for several years. Appealing to nostalgia and catering to other system owners has been, though. Part wishful thinking, but Nintendo has probably come around to the fact that their fans and hardcore players are the more stable profit pool. They're biting the bullet halfway with the Wii U now in order to take advantage of that in the future. The Wii U might be less supported than the others, but if it gets third parties to at least pay attention enough to port their games, Nintendo will probably be happy with that. From there, they're in a good position going into next-next gen.
With the Wii, they didn't have anything to lose. Third parties were barely giving them the time of day anyways, and they had a big opportunity to snap up this completely untapped market, so they took it. With Wii U, now they need to get back in the graces of third parties.
It's likely to prove to be somewhat of a mistake, but then again, who knows? Microsoft could blow it next gen and it doesn't seem like Sony would be able to capitalize on that if given the chance, which leaves Nintendo. Microsoft's now chasing the same casual gamers that made the Wii a success, and they've grabbed some of them with the Kinect. They might continue down that road. Unlikely, but possible.
