Former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida left the company recently, and he has been sharing some thoughts on the game industry and the PlayStation brand, such as why the PlayStation Vita trailed behind in popularity with competitors like the Nintendo 3DS.
In a new interview, he said that there was a combination of factors that lead the Vita to sell poorly. One reason was its proprietary memory cards. They were incredibly expensive and just added more costs for the consumer. While the PSP had the proprietary memory sticks, players were also able to use micro SD cards with an adapter.
In addition to the beautiful OLED screen, the Vita also had a back touchpad. While it provided some clever mechanics and gimmicks for some games, it was ultimately unnecessary. Both the OLED screen and touchpad further contributed to costs. One feature that was removed from the final product was a video-out option, which was present in the development kit version.
Game developers would be able to use it in order to connect to a screen, but it was removed in order to reduce some costs. Ironically, the PSP had a video out option, which let players connect their device to a TV or another external display.
However, Yoshida said that the Vita’s failure came down to the fact that Sony didn’t have enough bandwidth to support both the Vita and PS3 concurrently, especially with the PS4 on the horizon. “I think the biggest reason Vita didn’t do as well as we had hoped was we had to split all our efforts and resources into two different platforms,” Yoshida explained. “We didn’t have that resource.”
Sony is back in the handheld market, but with a different approach. The PlayStation Portal is only a remote-play device, but Sony is reportedly working on a PS5 handheld that would compete with Switch 2 and Steam Deck.
In the same interview, Yoshida theorized that director Hidetaka Miyazaki is too busy to remaster Bloodborne, as From Software’s next project is Elden Ring: Nightreign.