Life-to-date sales of Sony Computer Entertainment's PlayStation Vita continue to disappoint. Apparently, from April to June, Sony only managed to sell less than half million units, which causes doubts in the company's ability to ship ten million PS Vita devices this fiscal year, which ends in late March, 2012.

As of June 30, 2012, Sony shipped 2.2 million PlayStation Vita consoles worldwide, according to Uwe Bassendowski, the head of SCE Germany, reports PlayFront.de web-site. Gamasutra further notes that during the last fiscal year ended March 31, 2012, Sony shipped 1.8 million PS Vita units, which means that from April 1 to June 30 the company only sold around 400 thousand of PlayStation Vita consoles.
 

Sony Computer Entertainment blames mistakes in marketing campaign for slow sales of PS Vita. In particular, the company notes that the campaign essentially ignored younger audience and only concentrated on hardcore gamers who already have PlayStation Portable (PSP). Many of Sony executives, meanwhile, believe that the reason for poor sales of Vita was primarily low amount of video games at launch.

Despite of low demand for PlayStation Vita, Sony has no plans to intentionally cut its pricing (from $249 - $299 in the U.S.) so to make it accessible to wider audiences, primarily young people who do not own PSP and currently prefer to play on smartphones and tablets.

Sony PlayStation Vita is based on a system-on-chip with four ARM Cortex-A9 cores, PowerVR SGX543MP4+ graphics engine (accompanied by 128MB of memory) and a memory controller. The new portable game console has 5" multi-touch OLED screen with 960x544 resolution, typical set of PSP buttons, two cameras (front and rear), Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity, GPS, six-axis motion sensing system (three-axis gyroscope, three-axis accelerometer), three-axis electronic compass, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR controller, integrated speakers and microphone as well as multi touchpad located on the back side of the system.

Tags: Sony, Playstation, Vita