It's so strange that this game is so dead online so soon...it is:
Currently free on european PS+
Has a demo on vita which allows online
has cross-play between ps3 and vita
I think the biggest killer to the online on this game is how poorly they handled it at first, the matchmaking was horrible and it was a lagfest and it took them 4 months to fix it. when street fighter x tekken came out and had those online issues i returned a week later and have never looked back. I only stuck with doa cause im a big doa fan but i can see many just giving up.
I'm sure the matchmaking is still botched tho, why do i fight someone then not see them again? or if i search long enough i might see them again 10-20 mins later.
Also an annoying thing on the vita is that you'll get stuck searching and you cannot cancel out so you have to restart the game if you wanna do something else. another thing which is just going to turn people off.
one last annoying thing is how the default setting are, if you're an F rank, you will only search for F ranks, if you're D you will only search for D ranks, i bet many people just keep the default settings.
whoever was charge of the online portion of doa5 completely messed up, well done.