Game News PlayStation Vita: The former Sony boss expresses his regrets about the portable console!
In 2004 and 2005, Sony put the PlayStation Portable on the market which, in its 11-year career, sold 80 million units. Building on this success, Sony launched the PlayStation Vita which, unfortunately, would not have the same success.
Launched in 2011 and 2012, the PlayStation Vita comes with dual analog sticks, multi-touch OLED displayBluetooth, WiFi and 3G compatibility.
The PS Vita: born too late?
A real gem of technology for a portable console, but who seems to have trouble finding his place. From 2013, a new version of the console arrives, thinner and with better autonomy. It only comes out in France in 2014 and arrives with an OLED screen replaced by an LCD screen, and 1 GB of internal memory. At its side, Sony is launching the PlayStation Vita TV, which allows you to play games from the portable console on a television. Unfortunately, this new version does not boost sales of the portable machine in the Westa market largely occupied by the 3DS and by smartphones.
In October 2015, Sony announced discontinuation of in-house Vita game development, precipitating the end of the console. Third-party publishers, particularly Western ones, gave up on their projects and, in September 2018, Sony announced the end of production. A total of 15 million PlayStation Vita have been sold according to Glixel.
The regrets of the former American president of Sony Computer Entertainment
CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America from 2006 to 2014, Jack Trentton recently returned to this failure commercial during an interview with Axios. And it is with regret that the former CEO evokes this time:
There were definitely technologies that I thought were good but just didn’t have the level of support they needed. When you work for a big company, you have to love everything they do. It doesn’t matter if it’s to your liking or not. You come up with a new technology to introduce to industry and consumers, okay. But do you have the marketing budget to really get the message across? Do you have developer support funds to incentivize them to develop games to support this initiative? And sometimes you gave birth to the technology in the hope that it would take hold.
A few years ago, Jack Trentton gave an interview to IGN, in which he indicated that the console was “a great machine” but that it arrived “too late”. In this statement he referred to the explosion of the smartphone market and the place taken by Nintendo in the portable console sector. “But the Vita was a fine machine at a time when very few people felt they needed a dedicated portable device.” he added.
