Notice the lack of PlayStation Vita coverage during E3? You weren’t the only one, and Sony has come out with a response to those that think they’re abandoning the handheld.
Sony Europe president Jim Ryan explained why Vita wasn’t a focus during their E3 presentation in an interview with Game Reactor.
“You get an hour and half on the stage,” Ryan explained, “and you’ve got to work out what’s really important to talk about. And obviously PS4, and we also wanted to talk about the innovation stories of PlayStation Now, PlayStation TV and Morpheus. So that stuff was all top of the list.”
Vita doesn’t have much in the form of AAA games coming, and Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida said that the focus will remain on third-party and indie games on the system. Handheld spin-offs for franchises like Uncharted and Killzone, while good, simply didn’t create enough buzz to keep first-party titles coming to the system.
Nobody wants to create smaller ports of AAA titles heading to the new generation systems either, and ports like Borderlands 2 have received lukewarm reviews.
But can indie games themselves help keep the Vita afloat? A number of indie titles are already available — some much more in advance — on PC and mobile devices. That and the combination of an inferior controller when using remote play may not justify gamers from slapping down $200 on the handheld device.
Not showing much of the handheld during E3 and simply bringing it up by name shows the lack of confidence they have in it. We’ll see what they say next year if they continue to look past a system that deserves better treatment than it’s getting.
