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?
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.