What isn’t being talked about with the price announcement so much is the Vita brand. Sony is doing the right move here.
Most game consoles are named after the hardware or have a number to denote that it is sequel hardware. PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, 3DS, Gameboy Advance, Nintendo 64. And some names just are plain weird like Gamecube and Jaguar.
Vita sounds like some sort of bad cheese. Why is Latin as their brand? They should have just called the system ‘life’ but there were probably so many trademarks on that name.
The important thing is that Vita is not called the PSP 2. Even PSP, abbreviation for PlayStation Portable, sounded odd. Having a brand name for the console that is easy to remember, no abbreviations, no numbers in it, is a good thing. It would be wise for Microsoft and Sony to name their successors to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 as something other than Xbox Number and PlayStation 4.
The market tends to smile on new brand names. Atari. Nintendo (no one called it the NES then). Genesis (instead of Master System 2). Gameboy. DS. PlayStation. Wii. Perhaps gamers are always looking for something new, and a brand that isn’t a sequel to the old console gives an impression that the console is going to be filled with new stuff.
Still though, Vita does sound like some sort of bad cheese. Much better than PSP 2 or NGP though.