No PSP->Vita Discs in North America
Sony likes to do one good deed and then undermine it with another, so here's this month's entry in that saga: the "UMD Passport" program that would have let PSP users transfer the games from the soon-to-be obsolete PSP UMDs onto the new all-digital PS Vita hotness? Yep, they canned it in North America. I'm sure it was too expensive, or too confusing or whatever - no more confusing or expensive than asking consumers to buy into yet another new media format (which Sony has had a history of doing for over 35 years now) that gets dumped and goes unsupported after it becomes unprofitable. So for now, potential PS Vita buyers, you'll be re-buying your favorite PSP games if you want to take those along with you in the new console.
Is this such a big deal? Alone, no. Is this a sole sign of Sony's impending doom? Not really, but it also goes to show that Sony's history of creating media formats and trying to corner the market is a decades-long strategy that fails every single time they try it, and what's worse is that they erode consumer confidence in their products each time as well. And it's still going on, since the PS Vita doesn't take industry-standard SD or MicroSD cards. Nope, they've got another new memory card format (since their last one, Memory Stick, apparently was too open so they couldn't profit that much from it) for the Vita, one that asks you to far more than the SD standard for each gigabyte of storage.
Sony isn't just an evil corporation trying to screw its users over in every way possible - they do a lot of great things for gamers and for those who buy their home electronics - but their media strategy is one of pure contempt for those that otherwise want to buy their usually solid, decent products. And since nearly every portable device they've made uses some kind of insert-able media format, it's definitely a big deal in the long run. From PlayStation's black CD format to the protracted minidisc debacle, all the way back to Betamax and on forwards to Vita's new memory format, Sony spends too much money making new formats, tries to corner the markets on those formats and recover their investments through something akin to extortion with their customers, and when they fail, abandon them.
The only exception is Blu-Ray, a format that nearly lost the HD format disc war and is only successful now by way of Sony reluctantly opening up the format to many drive and device manufacturers. They've have screwed customers on that one, too, if they could have gotten away with it, but it was only the rest of Hollywood and the tech industry that stopped that.
