Is the PS Vita Dead?

This has been something that’s been rolling around the net for a while now, the supposed death of the Vita, thing is I’m not so sure if i disagree or not. I love my Vita, it’s by far the best purchase I’ve made, yet it doesn’t matter how good a system is if no one buys it and no dev.’s release games for it.

So the question is, Is the vita Dead?

While I’m not like a lot of the pundits and journalists I’ve read the past day or so, such as Eurogamer, kotaku and others, i do not think it’s dead yet. I do thing it’s borderline, and on life support however. The problems are myriad and deep, I’ll cover the ones i can think of but this is by no means a complete list:

  • Sony releasing a device to early
  • Sony not supporting said device
  • Sony using a proprietary over priced memory card
  • Sony not supporting older games on the device
  • Sony over charging for older and newer games
  • Game Dev.’s not supporting the device
  • Game Dev.’s porting older games, not adding new games
  • Consumers unwilling to give up their PSP catalogue
  • Consumers unwilling to spend vast amounts on the console

So, firstly lets look at the first point. Sony released the Vita way to early. The device is a great piece of kit, but in the course of a few years we’d had several iterations of the PSP, then the PSP Go, and then finally the Vita. Who has the cash to keep dropping on new handhelds every few years?

Sony’s support of the Vita has been spotty, despite the console being nice there were a number of issues with it, one of the biggest being the screens cracking due to over heating. Despite this being caused by a hardware problem, Sony stand firmly on the issue that it’s an out of warranty repair, which costs almost as much as buying a new device. There have been a number of problems with the buttons not working due to how quickly they get ‘gunked’ up from sweaty hands.

My own Vita is barely a month old and I’m having screen issues that are going to require me to send it back to the store for a replacement since Sony wanted to charge me near £200 to fix it.

One of the biggest issues that pundits have leapt all over is the cost of the memory cards. They claim these cards are just a locked form of microSD cards. However Sony claim otherwise, that the cards use their own proprietary formatting to prevent torrenting of the games. For me this isn’t as big an issue as many claim it is. Sure it sucks spending anywhere between £50-75 for a 32GB card, but lets face it you’ll only really need to buy one card. I’ve got loads of PSN Store games and have them all on my single card and still have 10GB of space left. I would like to see a special offer for new buys where you get the card for half price, i think that would increase sales.

It has, apparently, almost stopped piracy of games. I’ve seen a few dodgy looking sites offering torrents for Vita games, but as far as i know none of the major sites offer Vita torrents.

This next one is a big issue, Sony abandoned the PSP and PSP Go, forcing people to rebuy the exact same games on the new console. For many this was a kick in the teeth, why should they have to buy the same games all over again. Personally i can understand this and to a degree agree with it. I would like to have seen some sort of scheme where games that were available on the PSN Store for the vita, would get a discount. So if i have a game on my PSP i can import it to PSN for the vita for a nominal fee, say £5. For the games that aren’t on the Vita, some sort of software that would import the game completely to the Vita would be good.

If I’ve spent 100s, if not 1000s of pounds on PSP games, built up a large back catalogue of games, I’m sure as hell not going to spend more money to play them on the vita.

Which leads into the next problem, the over charging on the PSN Store. the PSP games are essentially a monopoly for Sony, they can and do charge whatever the hell they like. For example I’ve recently bought the Persona series, first game was £7.99, second and third were £40 in a dual pack, and the fourth was £34.99. Because the first three games are only available on the PSN Store for the Vita, Sony are free to price gouge their customers. The fourth game has a ‘disk’ release which is significantly cheaper. The question is though does the saving mean you can wait the time for the postal service to deliver it. Where as the PSN Store is immediate.

Many of the new games for Vita are in the same boat, pretty much every game I’ve seen released is cheaper elsewhere than on the PSN Store. So the only thing it really has over buying elsewhere is convenience. Where as buying it elsewhere means you get it on it’s own card and don’t have to lose any of your memory card beyond the few KB/s for saves.

Game Dev.’s are slow to pick up the Vita, and frankly can you blame them? Like the consumer they’ve had to deal with three new consoles faster than they’re used to. Many choose to support the PSP because that’s the device many people still have and use.

There’s also the size factor for the games, Dev.’s have been told (apparently) that all games have to be under the 4gb mark, since that’s the size of the initial memory card. this means more work to cut out stuff and make sure the size fits. A lot of Dev.’s just don’t see it being worth the effort, especially when tied with concerns over whether Sony will continue to support the Vita, release another new device, or kill it completely like they did with the PSP Go.

As a result of this Dev.’s tend to release older games that had been released on the PS3 previously, Disgaea 3 being a prime example. there are upsides to this, they can go back and fix things, tweak things, and in the case of Disgaea they added all the DLC that was on the PS3 and a few boss mobs from Disgaea 4. But again the problem is the cost, £34.99 for a game that’s a few years old. People aren’t really wanting to buy games they already have on their PS3 and play them again. They want new games, such as the recent Soul Sacrifice.

As i said earlier, consumers who own a PSP and games aren’t really willing to upgrade to the Vita. This is because the games they have can’t be ported over to the new device. Some of the games have been ported, but a lot of them still haven’t being ported over, and probably never will be sadly.

Also understandably, after spending a fortune on their PSP and games, consumers aren’t really prepared to throw out another £250 on the Vita and memory card, and then have to buy games as well. No matter how you look at it the cost of the Vita is prohibitively high.

So after all that, is the Vita Dead? No, but Sony have a lot of work to pull it from the brink.

Firstly, they need to stop selling the PSP, even today the device is still being sold all over the place. Faced with the Vita for £250 or the PSP for £89 which do you think people will buy? I understand that for a while they keep the older generation around as a buffer so as to make the upgrade easier. However it’s now time for the PSP to be allowed to disappear and the Vita to become the main device.

Allow stores to sell the memory cards at a steep discount to people that buy a new unit, at least 50% off.

Reassure both consumers and Dev.’s that the console is supported. you do this by joining forces with a publisher and bringing a ‘killer app’ to the console. for example on the 3DS you’ve Fire Emblem, Pokémon and Monster Hunter, when a new version of these games is released sales of the consoles sky rockets. The Vita has nothing like this, though Disgaea and Soul Sacrifice have the possibility of doing it, if they became Vita exclusives.

Slash the cost of the units, while this has already happened in the US and Japan it’s still stupidly high in the UK. Given that the consoles are region free, there’s a large market of people buying Vita’s from the US and selling them for a profit on the likes of EBay in the UK.

Offer some way for owners of PSP games to get them discounted on the Vita, they need an incentive to move over, since frankly at the moment there’s no call for them to move to the Vita.

Personally I’d like to see Sony work with more publishers and have them port PS3 games over, such as Ni no Kuni, i would love to play it on my Vita, other than through remote play. For that to really work though Sony would need to take the reigns off the game dev.’s and let them make games bigger than 4GB. And allow the consumer to download games directly through their PC and then be transferred to the Vita. For me this is a big issue, since my Vita doesn’t make full use of the download speed available. Downloading a 3GB file for example takes me like 20mins on my PC, but near 3hours on the Vita.

Sony have a lot of work of them to build the trust in the Vita device, but contrary to what many pundits are claiming i don’t see it as being dead, just yet.