Opinion: Good riddance, Luigi! Five reasons why 2014 will be The Year of Vita

If you've visited the World Wide Web over the last 12 months, you'll have seen The Year of Luigi promotion Nintendo embarrassingly tried to force upon the world.

It's safe to say that Nintendo didn't exactly 'execute' The Year of Luigi concept with aplomb. But there's no denying that The Big N delivered big time when it came to the 3DS in 2013.

However, if 2014 is looking like it'll belong to anyone, it's Sony.

While we were all (allegedly) celebrating the plumber in green's moment in the sun last year, the PlayStation Vita entered the public consciousness to a greater extent and became home to a surprisingly large number of great indie games.

2014 will assuredly be The Year of the Vita, then. And here's why...

There's a superb and extremely in-depth opinion piece about the power of the PS4 changing the way we play on the Vita over on PocketGamer.biz.

In summary, though, Sony began last year to take the first tentative steps to enabling you to play jaw-droppingly beautiful home console games remotely on your handheld.

You might not immediately see why this is important, sure. When you start to think about the possibilities this kind of technology opens up, however, it becomes clear.

Two forms of hardware in unison, where the technological limitations of one are negated by the other over a local network. This in itself is exciting.

But when you consider that PlayStation Now - Sony's content streaming service - will be available for Vita, you can start to see how Sony's handheld system is a long-term investment for developers and players alike.

Unity on Vita will attract developers in droves

Let's get ever-so-slightly technical for a moment: Unity is a development tool for the studios that make the games you love. It's a suite of game-making doohickeys, in essence.

And the best part about it is that the finished product will run on many different devices. You can now spit out Unity games that work on Vita.

So, instead of having to port games over to the Vita from scratch, Unity developers can now keep Sony's platform in mind when making their games and release them for PlayStation's portable much more easily and much more quickly.

This could mean that the hottest new indie games are available on the Vita at the same time as they are on their home console and PC counterparts.

Cheaper thrills

2DS is (at the time of writing) just £90 in the UK and $130 in the US. Say what you want about the 2DS, but access to a current-gen portable at that price is a mightily tempting prospect for consumers.

A PlayStation Vita is about £160 / $190, by contrast. And while Sony has dropped its price steadily, it needs to lower it even further to compete with Nintendo. Sony knows this.

I'll make a prediction right now: Sony will drop the Vita to £120 / $150 in 2014. I imagine you'll get a small memory card and a PlayStation Plus trial subscription for that price, too. This will be an attempt on Sony's part to get as many gamers as possible into the PlayStation ecosystem and to encourage them to go digital.

The price drop on the Vita might be accompanied by news of a re-design, too, especially if certain rumours floating about are true. This would mean the price of the original unit is probably pushed down further, much like the RRP of an existing iPhone when Apple releases a new model.

If you've recently grabbed yourself a spangly new PlayStation 4 and tried to go online with it, you'll have noticed that opening up a PlayStation Plus account is now mandatory.

I must say that I was initially irked by this compulsory 'requirement'. But it's meant that if you own both a PS4 and a Vita, you now have access to a large library of Vita games, which will continue to grow over the coming months and years.

This will result in your using your Vita more and more. And combined with the frequent sales on the PlayStation Store, your handheld gaming costs are going to fall dramatically.

Nintendo's Wii U wasn't the out-and-out success a lot of people thought it would be. And 3DS sales figures weren't exactly stellar.

The venerable Japanese games company is fine, of course, and is unlikely to be going anywhere in the immediate future. Its 3DS hardware is starting to look tired, mind, and third-party support for the company as a whole is thinning.

With Sony enjoying a lot of critical success stories last year on Vita - and a few surprise commercial hits - and fostering a lot of goodwill towards its handheld from indies and game fans, it's easy to see Sony giving Vita a huge push this year to capitalise on the momentum it's built.

Expect tons of marketing, a renewed fervour to court the independent game makers, and a greater focus on Sony's powerhouse portable as the higher-ups at Sony take this opportunity to take a bite out of Nintendo's audience.