PlayStation Vita hasn’t had an easy go of it in its first year on the market. For as promising as the handheld appeared to be before its release, it’s failed to light the sales charts on fire both in its native Japan and in the west. As a result, questions about Vita’s future have already arisen in earnest as Sony continues to stand by its machine, seemingly unaware (or simply unwilling to admit) that anything has gone wrong.

“ [Vita's] dual analog sticks and high-tech innards seemed to give it considerable leverage...

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“ Suddenly, Vita wasn’t looking like such a good deal at retail...

“ ...it’s impossible not to acknowledge that Vita’s sales must improve markedly for it to be viable long-term to Sony...

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“ Part of me feels that Sony has something up its sleeve with Vita, something unexpected.

Before Vita came out, it had everything going for it. At E3 2011, we expected Sony to tag an unreasonable price on its shiny new handheld, but the company did the exact opposite, pricing it fairly and giving it early appeal to would-be adopters. The vacancy of steady releases that slowly overtook the PSP’s latter years was quickly nipped in the bud, with Sony intent on using both its first-party resources and the power of its third-party relationships to give Vita a promising library of games right off the bat and for the duration of its first 12 months.Perhaps most importantly, Vita was primed to roundly trounce its primary competition in the form of Nintendo 3DS. Its dual analog sticks and high-tech innards seemed to give it considerable leverage, allowing it to play games the 3DS cannot, easily besting it technologically. Likewise, seamlessly hitching Vita to PS3 (and vice-versa) with the ability to play some of the same games over both platforms appeared like it would be too good to pass up. The stars aligned for PlayStation Vita, or so I thought, and I predicted it would be successful as a result. But as I’ve stated many times in the past year, I was dead wrong.Vita’s failure to thrive can perhaps be traced back to the weeks and months before it was released, when the cloudless skies hanging over the handheld suddenly began to look overcast. News slowly but surely leaked about Vita’s capabilities – or lack thereof – including its lack of substantial built-in memory and heinously expensive memory cards that players would have to purchase to download and save games. Depending on the size of the memory card purchased, you'd have to tack an extra $100 or so onto the otherwise affordable price for the Vita itself. Suddenly, Vita wasn’t looking like such a good deal at retail, and the memory card issue persists to this day as a major roadblock barring entry to gamers on a budget.Sony has also stubbornly refused to drop the price of Vita in the face of prevailing winds from the iOS and Android markets, as well as from Nintendo. The latter company artfully vanquished Vita right out of the gate with a well-aimed price drop partnered with the release of huge games. Sony has yet to recover or prove to anyone outside of the hardcore PlayStation ecosystem why Vita is a handheld worth having, and insisting on “value added” price fixes instead of outright price drops simply won’t solve the problem over the long-term.The biggest two misses, however, were Nihilistic Software’s two forays on the PlayStation Vita in the form of Resistance: Burning Skies and Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified. The importance of first-person shooters on the very first handheld not only capable of running console-quality games, but one with dual analog sticks, simply cannot be understated. Yet, Resistance was a dud and Black Ops Declassified -- which had the power to be the biggest and most important game in Vita’s catalog – proved to be junk. And incredibly, both games supported eight-player multiplayer, a shadow of that aforementioned “console quality on the go” Sony touts the Vita as in commercials.To be completely fair, the one rumor that persists to this day about Vita that’s categorically false is that it has few games to play, and even fewer good ones. As anyone who owns a Vita knows, that’s simply not true. Persona 4 Golden, Dokuro, Sound Shapes, Escape Plan, Super Stardust Delta, LittleBigPlanet PS Vita, Gravity Rush, Unit 13, Tales From Space: Mutant Blobs Attack and Uncharted: Golden Abyss are some examples of games worthy of anyone’s time. Those games could easily keep you busy for a full calendar year.With sales of Vita hovering around the 4 million mark worldwide, it’s impossible not to acknowledge that Vita’s sales must improve markedly for it to be viable long-term to Sony and, just as importantly, the publishers that are expected to bring games to the handheld. PlayStation Portable, considered a success at retail, has sold roughly 75 million units in about eight years on the market, or more than 9 million per year since release. Vita lags significantly behind PSP, which itself was trounced by Nintendo’s DS (just as 3DS is trouncing Vita). At this rate, Vita’s sales are on pace for 32 million sold over an identical eight-year period, and the math used to arrive at that sum is generous. The numbers speak for themselves.So the real question becomes easy to identify: with an underwhelming install base with no signs of improving, will third-parties even bother putting their games on Vita in 2013 and beyond? In this sense, Vita’s failure will become a self-fulfilling prophecy, regardless of if Sony itself intends on supporting Vita well into the future with its own studios. They have 12 exclusive studios, a new console on the horizon and PlayStation 3 still to support. The first party can’t carry Vita on its back, and even if it did, their offerings are unlikely to lure a drove of new customers through the door.Part of me feels that Sony has something up its sleeve with Vita, something unexpected. The most obvious thing would be that it somehow connects with the next PlayStation, perhaps as a second screen solution similar to what Nintendo has done with Wii U’s gamepad. This would explain Sony’s blasé attitude towards Vita’s poor sales; under this hypothetical, the company’ll have a chance to “relaunch” Vita. Perhaps it will even be bundled with the new system from the get-go.As I’ve said time and time again, PlayStation Vita is the handheld I’ve always wanted. It’s a stellar example of what's possible in the realm of gaming on the go, and with the 3DS selling so steadily, the market itself isn’t against dedicated portable gaming. But Nintendo has games that sell, a rapidly expanding install base and feverishly dedicated consumers. With Vita, PlayStation doesn’t have any of that, and without the assistance of rose-colored glasses, 2013 isn’t looking great for Sony’s handheld that could, but hasn’t.

Colin Moriarty is an IGN PlayStation editor. You can follow him on Twitter and IGN and learn just how sad the life of a New York Islanders and New York Jets fan can be.