After a launch week of over 42,000 units sold in Japan, the PS Vita TV dropped to under 8,000 sold in the week following, and Sony still hasn’t made any mention of a release date for the device in the west.
As Sony President Andrew House told Eurogamer, “The positioning of Vita TV may be different between Japan and some of the other markets.” After adding how Sony wanted to release PS Vita TV first in Japan because “I feel there really hasn’t been a critical driver or device that’s driven the adoption of streaming content overall,” House continued:
We felt there was therefore an opportunity to leverage the strengths of PlayStation Vita, which as you know is quite strong in Japan in terms of game line-up, but combine that with the features of a media streaming box, and offer something packaged newly for the Japanese consumer and possibly be at the forefront of creating a new market via that device.
With a “much greater establishment of streaming video services” in North America and Europe, House says they are seeing strong potential for the PlayStation Vita TV in other parts of the world, “but it will be a different road to market for the US and Europe than has been the case in Japan.”
