Shuhei Yoshida on the PS Vita’s Flop: Sony’s former head of PlayStation, Shuhei Yoshida, has offered insights into why the PS Vita did not succeed as well as its predecessor.
Main Reasons for Failure
According to Yoshida, a key factor was the split development resources. Development teams were allocated between the PS4 and Vita, leading Sony to prioritize the more popular home console system:
Development resources were split and they didn’t have enough studios to make games for 2 platforms, so they had to prioritize PS4 development.
Other Contributing Issues
Proprietary Memory Cards
Propriety memory cards were a significant downfall, as consumers had to spend more money for additional storage. Yoshida acknowledges this was a mistake:
That was a mistake. People have to spend more money to get the memory card.
Design Choices
The rear touch panel and OLED display, which seemed promising during prototypes, were ultimately deemed unnecessary or too costly. Removing TV-out functionality from the final consumer model also contributed to poor sales.
In the development hardware for Vita, it had a video out so a developer can connect to screen and develop games on and somehow, the team decided to take that feature out from the consumer unit to save a few cents.
Have you owned a Vita? Do you think the platform was worthy of greater resource allocation from Sony?
The OLED screen was the best part of it. Touch controls, both front and rear, camera and microphone were a waste of money. The lack of TV out was a fatal blow tough.
I watched this happen, it was death in slow motion. Sony never gave the Vita the resources it needed.
2011-2012 - Vita launches with 25 games.
E3 - 2012 - Sony skips the Vita at E3 and instead devotes 30 minutes to “Wonderbook”. When asked why they skipped their newly launched console, Sony explains that there’s only so much time during a keynote. The Wonderbook would not last the season.
E3 - 2013 - Vita games are shown, but they are chiefly indie games that are available on other platforms like Spelunky. Tearaway, the stand out exclusive title, would eventually sell only 14,000 copies and be ported to PS4.
E3 - 2014 - Sony skips the Vita at E3 and instead devotes 30 minutes to talk about the Powers TV show, a show which, at the time, had not even been cast and had nothing to actually show. Both the show and the video service it’s on would soon be cancelled.
2014 - Sony announces first party games are scaling back, hard to scale back from something that was barely there in the first place, and would focus primarily on Indie and 3rd party development.
2015 - Sony admits publicly that AAA development on the Vita has stopped at all internal Sony studios.
2018 - Physical game production stops.
2019 - Vita hardware production stops.
I had a Vita and I loved it, it was incredible compared to the PSP and 3DS.
But the internal memory was a joke making the memory stick practically mandatory if you wanted to buy a game in the store, which being proprietary wouldn’t be an issue if it wasn’t expensive as hell.
The catalog of games was really small (at least in Europe, maybe in Japan wasn’t the case). I loved the few games I had but every time I tried to go to the store to see if anything interesting had come out I was disappointed.
The development platform for indies was a framework for mobile phone that was focused for Sony smartphones, so indie games couldn’t take full advantage of the console.
It felt like Sony abandoned the console too quickly and let it agonise.
They Sega’d themselves. The console itself was okay - the context it launched in was fucked. Nobody was excited for yet another PSP that took yet another Memory Stick format and used yet another game store. They didn’t even like buying new games for the PSP they owned, when half of them demanded a firmware update. Nevermind that jailbreaking was fantastic and widespread - it took a fucking hour, minimum, because the damn gizmo would only do it if you were plugged in and had full battery.
Being good didn’t matter. Customers and developers alike simply were not interested. The trust was gone, and the ecosystem did not develop.
The Switch proves Sony should have allocated more resources to the vita.
With the 3DS struggling on its first years, they had a serious shot at the handheld market. Not complaining since in the end, 3DS took off and got fantastic games, but Sony clearly missed an opportunity.
The Vita was great, but I didn’t really get into more than a handful of games until SD2VITA became available. (The adaptor allowing the use of an SD card through the game slot).
Sure, then you can’t use game cards, but who needs those now that you dump games and keep your entire library on that one SD card, ready to go anytime, for pennies?
If that had been how it worked from the start, I would have bought so many more games. The library started off decent, and aventually got really damn good.
But a lot was digital only, especially the indie stuff, so at the time, getting new games was like pulling teeth.
I only got it to play WipEout 2048, but Gravity Rush turned out to be one of my all time favorite games, and Killzone Mercenaries showed me the genius of gyro aim before anyone else had even heard of it.
Still own it, finally modded it a few months back. It’s a shame Sony screwed the pooch on it, it’s a fantastic handheld.
Despite the shortcomings, the fact that you could leave the Vita on standby for eons without losing a significant charge made it my favourite handheld ever.
