If you've been patiently waiting to buy a Vita, hoping that slow sales would spur Sony to follow Nintendo's example and quickly lower the portable's $250 asking price, you'll have to be patient through the end of the year at the very least. Sony Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida told Eurogamer that 2012 was "too early" to drop the price of the system.

"People like cheap or free," Yoshida told the site. "Of course, cost reduction is one area our engineering team is working on. But we just launched the platform earlier this year. It takes time to do so."

"At a certain point in the future we would like to address the pricing issue for some of the people who are waiting," he continued. "But this year we are trying to add value by creating different types of bundles," including packages with games like Little Big Planet and Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified.

Instead of a lower price, Sony is pinning the Vita's turnaround on the appeal of upcoming first- and third-party software, including many intriguing new titles just announced this week. While the Vita launched with one of the largest game lineups in console history, the subsequent months have seen the flow of software slow to a trickle.

Though Yoshida said he sees the Vita's software lineup as healthy, he acknowledged "the expectations of people have changed since the launch of smartphone gaming [where] there is so much available in terms of variety and numbers." He hoped the PlayStation Mobile initiative launching this fall would help "provide an ecosystem like the App Store" by letting indie developers create smaller games for both the Vita and PlayStation-certified Android devices.

These efforts certainly can't hurt, but we're a little skeptical that any amount of software will convince a critical mass of people to buy the system at $250. With both the Nintendo 3DS and iPod Touch offering compelling portable gaming options at a lower price, many consumers apparently fail to see the value proposition in the Vita's extra power, which comes the closest to replicating that of a home console. The cost that it takes Sony to produce that kind of power and the price consumers are willing to pay for it seem pretty misaligned at the moment, and it appears unlikely that this gap will be closed by year's end.