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PlayStation Fami, I posit a question to you: if you are in charge of launching the PS Vita, what do you do to ensure it does well?

Hero of Hyrule

Hero of Hyrule

Frieren the Slayer
Pronouns
He/Him
playstation-vita.jpg


Hello everyone, and welcome to Episode 2 of my series of threads covering hypothetical scenarios where we as a sales community, using the benefit of hindsight, try to salvage failed or troubled console launches. Episode 1 was exactly three weeks ago, when we discussed the troubled launch of the Wii U, and whether or not given the situation as it was at the time, there was any getting out of it. That question led to some very interesting discussions. If you are interested in reading those, or in adding your voice to the discussion, make sure to check it out here!

Which brings us to this new instalment, and this one will be covering... the PS Vita.

The PS Vita is an incredibly high profile failure, and probably, by most measures, the only true failure associated with the PlayStation brand. Sony's second (and last) dedicated handheld was a colossal failure on the market, selling a fraction of its predecessor's total numbers. It sold so poorly, in fact, that Sony outright stopped reporting numbers for it (the best we have are estimates that peg it at 13-15 million units, making it a Wii U level flop), and an alarmingly quick abandonment in the marketplace, not just by customers and many third parties, but by Sony themselves, who as a platform holder, and a first party publisher, publicly dissociated from the Vita as soon as was viable, and then exited the handheld sphere entirely.

The ripple effects of the Vita's market performance are felt to this day; Sony's direction as a platform holder and game maker shifted towards exclusively high end and premium experiences, eschewing the more experimental nature of their earlier platforms and software. Sony's market presence in Japan totally collapsed, and it has not been able to recover from that to this day. On the more positive side of things, the whole "console gaming on the go" conceit, as well as the primacy placed on indie and mid tier games, by Sony in among their final attempts to prop up the dying Vita, ended up leading to the template Nintendo would follow with the Switch not long after, and to a bustling community of smaller and mid-tier developers that had otherwise been threatened to be orphaned by the HD transition.

The Vita, however, did not need to fail. While many, including Sony themselves, will say that the handheld market was dead, and there was no saving the Vita, history has shown that to be false. The Vita's contemporary competitor, the 3DS, had a troubled start, but managed to rally and ended up doing fairly good numbers; the Switch is en route to becoming the highest selling system of all time, and the primary appeal of that is its portable nature. The Vita's failures, therefore, come down almost entirely to Sony not making an effort, or not the right kind of effort.

With the benefit of hindsight, I want to ask Famiboards - what would you have done to try and have it sell more than it ultimately ended up doing? You essentially have carte blanche, but you act under these constraints:

  • You cannot change the system hardware. All of it, including the specs, the OLED screen, the rear touch pad, the battery, and, yes, the memory cards, must be retained. You can choose to make smaller changes to the hardware (you can choose to forego the 3G inclusion entirely, and you can change the charging port from a proprietary one to a standard one, if you wish), but the nature of the system is what it is, you can't change it
  • You can make any changes you want to the marketing and release strategy. This includes release window, SKUs, bundles, pricing, and yes, branding (meaning everything up to and including the name is fair game to be changed)
  • You can request changes to OS, UI, services, digital store, memory management, ecosystem, how the Vita interacts with other devices, all of that is fine
  • You can choose to redirect resources from PS3 and/or PS4 to the PS Vita
  • You can make changes to third party outreach (third parties of any size, including Japanese or western, AAA, mid tier, or indie)
  • You can make changes to first party studio strategy
  • You cannot choose to abandon the Vita. The Vita must release, and it must release in the form it was in. You are, as specified, allowed to make more minor changes
As with the Wii U episode, the purpose of this thought exercise is simple - it is to see if, given the situation Sony found itself in in 2011, with the PSP having been a bit of a Pyrrhic victory (huge success from a hardware sales perspective, albeit outsold by its competitor 2:1, and extremely low software sales thanks to acute piracy) , and years of R&D into its successor having solidified what the successor would be like, while the broader market had been transformed by the arrival of smartphones and tablets, was there anything Sony could have done differently to make the Vita a success? Or was the broader realignment the PlayStation brand undertook around this time an inevitability?

Within the constraints of the situation Sony was in in 2011, would the Vita even have been a "success"? How much more could it have sold? For example, if you post a full fledged plan for making the Vita sell more than it ultimately did, what do you envision the final sales tally being? Would the investment in such a case truly have been worth it?

I look forward to seeing what you have to say.
 
Slash memory card prices in half. Release the system with a 16gb memory card so people didn’t have to spend more money off the bat just to play the damn system.

Lean heavily on its ability to play PSOne Classics and also put the work in to ensure PS2 Classics were also playable. Treat it as a true Playstation Portable and not some side project.

One of the main issues with Vita is it was weirdly tied to the PS3 during a time when people were ready to move on to the PS4. When Sony ultimately released the PS4, it immediately put itself in a zone separate from the Vita and PS3. I would ensured there was more synergy between Vita and PS4 so that gamers on PS4 felt the need to get a Vita.
 
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go back in time and prevent the pokemon ip from becoming a global phenomenon
 
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ViewtifulCereza said:
Get Monster Hunter on it.
Click to expand...
It got a bad Monster Hunter title (Frontier) , the reason why it didnt get MH was that PS Vita bombed and was hard to develop for compared to the 3DS that was extremly successful in Japan , so it limited a lot the sales of MH making it a Vita game. Sony would have to pay a lot of money to Capcom to get a ‘main’ entry (3DS/Vita would need their own entries) and that would have only helped in Japan, everywhere else Vita would still bombed even with MH, also the Western MH Portable 3rd situation
 
Blue Monty said:
It got a bad Monster Hunter title (Frontier) , the reason why it didnt get MH was that PS Vita bombed and was hard to develop for compared to the 3DS that was extremly successful in Japan , so it limited a lot the sales of MH making it a Vita game. Sony would have to pay a lot of money to Capcom to get a ‘main’ entry (3DS/Vita would need their own entries) and that would have only helped in Japan, everywhere else Vita would still bombed even with MH
Click to expand...
Not true, Capcom went with 3DS for Monster Hunter because Nintendo explicitly collaborated with them on securing the series as an exclusive. If Sony had been more proactive rather than simply assuming Monster Hunter would come to Vita (a state of assuming third party support for PlayStation systems as "default" thanks to their traditional dominance in the console arena, the trouble is that that obviously did not extend to the handheld market), they could have absolutely managed to secure Monster Hunter for the Vita. Your assertion that MH didn't come to Vita because Vita was struggling or 3DS was successful doesn't make sense, because the decision for it to go with 3DS and skip Vita was made long before either platform actually released to the market.

The idea that Vita was expensive to develop for is also false, it was extremely easy and cheap to develop for. In fact, for developers with established development pipelines for the other consoles, mobiles, and/or PC, it was easier to develop for Vita than the 3DS, by a whole lot. There is a reason so much smaller and mid tier stuff came to the Vita and skipped the 3DS, because the 3DS was simply far too difficult to wrangle for developers relative to the Vita, it was designed as bespoke, boutique hardware in an era when the world had moved on to multiplatform pipelines. Meanwhile, Sony went out of their way to ensure development for Vita would be easy, especially if you were already developing for PS3 and/or PS4 (not to mention how many in-house support teams they kept for third parties working on Vita games or versions of their games, even long after they had ditched the system themselves; again, this is something Nintendo did not do with the 3DS, or even the Wii U, they only started this with the Switch).

Lastly, Vita getting MH would definitely only have helped it in Japan; but that alone would be a huge boon (since Japan was the primary market for portable systems that generation). And, assuming that proactively securing MH was reflective of Sony's attitude towards the Vita wholesale, it's not much of a stretch to assume that they would have tried to secure similarly big name games for the Vita that would have helped it in other markets too (something from Rockstar, a better AssCreed or COD game, maybe a FIFA title that was more than a hand-me-down).
 
fucking support it with premium games. that's what killed it. Sony didn't want to put their best on it, but they only gave studios one shot at the damn thing. a second Uncharted with more budget and time in the oven would have been great. same with Killzone. but Sony got cold feet after the first outings

and SD card support, of course
 
  • Forget about the 3G model. Just launch one sku with Wifi.
  • Figure out a way to launch the system at $199.99. If you absolutely have to go $249.99, then including a 16GB memory card is absolutely necessary.
  • Higher memory card prices need to be slashed. If you want proprietary cards to combat piracy, that is fine. Don't make these cards cost an arm and a leg.
  • First party software. Sony should have either put more effort into their first party offerings after the first year, or offer their IP's to other developers to make games for.
  • Add the PS2 classics line to the Vita shop.
  • Have some sort of a Street Pass app for the Vita to encourage traveling with the system.
 
What does "does well" mean here?

Anyway, I think it could sell better if a) third-party SD cards are made compatible and b) the backpad is eliminated for an actual button or other option. Some games are really not very playable because the backpad sucks.

It probably also needs better Western support, but I don't know how you get that, really. It feels like the 3DS/Vita generation is where big Western studios/publishers are sort of done with throwing money and devpower at dedicated handhelds.
 
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Make it cheaper by

Skipping the back touch panel
Not releasing a 3g model
Use a standard charging cable
Use micro a sd card slot

Get better games

Pay for Monster Hunter
Pay Sega for Kurohyō: Ryū ga Gotoku Shinshō 3
Advertise playing ps1, psp and vita games
Expand your first party studios years in advance
 
I’m going to break the rules laid out here, because the biggest thing was the memory cards being so expensive. If your power users don’t necessarily want to buy a lot of games because memory is such a factor, it’s going to cause huge ripple effects. They shouldn’t have cost what they did and ultimately they probably should have just used SD cards.

Beyond that, clickable sticks would have been ideal with two extra shoulder buttons. First party either should have been less games with higher quality or they should have given themselves more time. You can’t make a good Resistance and Call of Duty game in just six months. Uncharted Golden Abyss shouldn’t have been the only game on its level.
 
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Tailzo said:
Make it cheaper by

Skipping the back touch panel
Not releasing a 3g model
Use a standard charging cable
Use micro a sd card slot

Get better games

Pay for Monster Hunter
Pay Sega for Kurohyō: Ryū ga Gotoku Shinshō 3
Advertise playing ps1, psp and vita games
Expand your first party studios years in advance
Click to expand...
I think that covers it. Software is such a key point in selling any hardware and they didn't secure enough major titles for the system. Getting Square-Enix and Namco to produce some exclusives is also important. Sony should've paid for Final Fantasy Type-02 to happen. But making the hardware more affordable is also just as important. so despite the OP saying we cannot change the hardware, it's such a big factor in turning the Vita into something Sony as a company would actually want to sell more of.
 
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Basically I'd either make the memory cards cheaper or make them compatible with SD cards. My Switch really makes it easy to just put in a 400 GB SD card (I know there are even higher memory capacity ones too). I'd also include more first party support as Sony really dropped the ball there, and I'd keep trying for more third party support. I'd also make the PSN UI a little better because that could have used a little work too.
 
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ILikeFeet said:
fucking support it with premium games. that's what killed it. Sony didn't want to put their best on it, but they only gave studios one shot at the damn thing. a second Uncharted with more budget and time in the oven would have been great. same with Killzone. but Sony got cold feet after the first outings

and SD card support, of course
Click to expand...
This, plus don't have that crappy back touch panel, but add L2 and R2
 
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$199 Wi-Fi model only

SD Card Support with a 16gb card in the box

Scratch treating it like a portable PS3

Treat it like it’s own thing getting high quality exclusive PS titles by mandating studio support

Lean into getting a robust PS classics library out there from day 1.

Improve the interface and the store/buying experience

Ideally scrap the initial design that was a little too bulky/heavy even if people like that blown out OLED screen.

Split the top triggers so you get 4 buttons and scratch the back touch pad but keep the front touch.
 
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The system really needed to come out in early 2010/late 2009; yes it would've meant launching with weaker hardware, but it would've given it a much better chance at vita life; as it would've been hitting before smartphones completely snuffed the life out of the dedicated handheld market.

There are other things, but that is easily the biggest one. The system simply launched too late.
 
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Drop 3g, just creates consumer confusion and a waste of money. Use a standard USB charge cable. This helps a tiny bit.

Force all Sony Studios to support the device. The fact that they had someone from Naughty Dog speaking poorly about the Vita should have never been allowed. No spinoffs or side games, mainline stuff. Give it the same kind of support and budget and marketing as console games. Uncharted 4 is a Vita game. They can make Uncharted 5 for the PS4 later. All studios are mandated to give it the same kind of support the PS3 got and the PS4 would get. This is the biggest problem the Vita had.
 
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Honestly? No fucking idea. The thing was kinda doomed to fail thanks to the market it launched it. Maybe make the memory cards cheaper? I really don’t know.
 
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Phantom Thief said:
On the more positive side of things, the whole "console gaming on the go" conceit, as well as the primacy placed on indie and mid tier games, by Sony in among their final attempts to prop up the dying Vita, ended up leading to the template Nintendo would follow with the Switch
Click to expand...
Available technologies led Nintendo to that strategy, I think, not the Vita. Handhelds were always heading in that direction, cost and size were the obstacles.
 
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