People saying that the PSP and Vita got clapped by Nintendo, the last confirmed PSVR sales numbers was 5m units sold after 3 years on the market. That’s what, a third of the Vita’s numbers?
Sony should definitely offer a supplementary handheld, even if it was just for streaming PS5 games and playing PS4 games/indies. If it sold 15m units but was profitable for Sony, then who cares what Nintendo would sell.
There is a big difference: portables are/were a huge established market, with PSP performing pretty well selling over 80 million copies as Sony's first step, but the next gen the portble market sales decreased a lot. Nintendo decreased from 154M to 76M and Sony from ~80M to around ~15M as the mobile market grew and grew way more than that.
The budget of big Vita games was almost the same of the ones of a home console, which wasn't sustainable with that userbase. For the players its price was too high, particularly the one of its propietary cards which were needed due to default internal storage. Sony decided to focus on consoles and leave the portable market to Nintendo, who now performed great with Switch. They now have the monopoly and since their home console and portable are the same they don't need to make dedicated games for the portable and don't have their teams and catalog split into two machines which did help them to grow a huge userbase.
The other side is PSVR, basically a pioneer experiment where they make the first steps in a technology that may be (part of) the future. It isn't a separated platform, but an accesory instead. Meaning that the development is the same than in home console but with the obvious changes related to VR. It's a small niche for tech savvy early adopters who want to see the first rocky steps of something cool that may end being important, and that started with a market that didn't exist and was so expensive, so they didn't expect big sales. In fact, it sold better than Sony expected, they are happy with it and made PSVR2. Now it should be easier for them to make certain VR games playable both in the tv with a dual sense or in VR with Sense controllers, so being less limited in terms of game sales ro recoup their investent in the development of these games, which also means PSVR2 games will not only be small games and experiences, some of them may also go AAAish.
They plan to bring some of their IPs to mobile and they are also bringing Remote Play and PS Now to mobile. And looking at patents seems they'll also make a joycon like splittable DS controller to attach it to tablets and phones. Plus their PC ports will be playable on Steam Deck and similar PC handhelds. I know it isn't the same than to release another portable, but unlike making another portable that approach will be sustainable and profitable to them, in addition to keep people busy who could be doing games for their home console.
To make games require a lot of time and resources, and they have to focus on making games for PS consoles. The last thing we need is Sony releasing less games for PS5 because they are focusing on make dedicated games for a portable. Unless they find a better way to play current gen games on a portable device, the current focus will be the one to follow.
