PS Vita's Tough Outing – Only 400k Units Sold in Q2

A man plays a Nintendo 3DS portable game console near a advertisement of Sony's PlayStation Vita handheld gaming device at a Yamada Denki electronics retail store in Tokyo. Credit:Reuters

Sony has revealed its PlayStation Vita sales figures, which are pretty dismal. Per reports, the company has sold only 2.2 million PS Vita units worldwide.

The German gaming site Playfront.de was the first to disclose the figure. Later, Joystiq got a statement from Sony which said "The latest figures we've released for Vita (as of June 30th) are 2.2. million sales worldwide."

The sales figure is shocking as it's been five months since the handheld was released. The figure should come as a major shock to Sony and at this rate third-party developers may not want to continue developing for its systems. 

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Keeping in mind that the handheld sold just 400,000 units in Q2, it's pretty odd for a device that boasts such a lot of power. In the recent quarterly earnings report (that covered the period from April to June), Sony said that both the Vita and PSP sold a total of 1.4 million units, which means that one million of those devices were PSPs.

The new report has just arrived after Sony confirmed that the PS Vita will not get a price cut this year.

Speaking to Eurogamer at Gamescom, SCE Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida stated that the price will not go down this year as it was "too early" and Sony engineers were supposedly working on "cost reduction", which takes time.

However, Sony fans can gather hope from the fact that the company's engineers are hard at work trying to reduce production costs, which may in turn aid a price cut for the unit and the availability of a cheaper PS Vita.

PS Vita is expected to face major competition down the line after Nintendo officially released its latest 3DS XL earlier.