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This article on ‘The PlayStation Vita Was Seriously Ahead of Its Time’ was available earlier as part of the GamerBraves Newsletter. Sign up for free to gain access to more articles about news and trends in the gaming industry and community.
Original Article: You can’t help but feel bad for the PlayStation Vita. This is a system that had so much potential but was let down by a lack of support and a couple of bad hardware decisions. It’s especially a shame nowadays because so many other companies are now doing more or less what Vita’s selling feature was to great success.
The Nintendo Switch is now the third best-selling console of all time, The Steam Deck is becoming increasingly popular and many other companies throwing their hat in the HD handheld console ring like the Ayaneo Air and the recently announced ROG Ally. There are even rumors that PlayStation is making a new handheld that will stream PS5 games.
With this in mind, I thought it’d be interesting to look back at the Vita, the first attempt to make an HD handheld console.
The Launch
There was a lot of buzz around the PS Vita when it was first announced. The PSP was a big hit despite selling nowhere as well as the Nintendo DS. It showed that PlayStation could compete in the handheld market and people were optimistic about the Vita.
For a handheld, it was a beast. The idea of being able to run graphics almost as well as the PS3 and 360, the current-gen consoles of the time was unheard of. It also had two proper analog sticks, and a sleek OLED screen, both new concepts for handheld consoles that added to the appeal. By comparison, the Nintendo 3DS with its lower graphics and analog circle pad looked weak by comparison, especially as the system wasn’t doing so well in its first few months due to the lack of popular launch titles.
The Vita really took advantage of this issue by promoting a pretty stellar lineup. The treasure of the bunch was Uncharted: Golden Abyss, a full-fledged Uncharted Adventure that looked almost on par with its console counterparts. This was backed by popular first-party franchises like Wipout, and Hot Shots Golf as well as solid third-party offerings like Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3, and BlazBlue Continuum Shift Extend.
With the rocky history of fighting games on handhelds seeing two big-name fighting titles on a handheld almost identical to the home version was stunning. It really felt like the Vita was fulfilling that promise, home console experiences on the go.
It would even get major titles from modern consoles like Street Fighter X Tekken, Borderlands 2, and Dragon’s Crown. There were even some games like PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royal where you’d get a free copy of the Vita version if you bought the PS3 version. It showed the synergy between home and handheld consoles and the power of the Vita as a platform. So what went wrong?
The Memory Cards
Another big win during the pre-launch was that the PS Vita would only be $250 USD. This was the same price as the 3DS and having such a powerful device for the same price as its competitor was seen as an enormous win for the Vita.
But then PlayStation revealed the proprietary memory cards, and this is where the extra cost came in. The 8GB model cost $45 USD while the 32GB model was $120, almost half the price of the console. The Vita also had almost no internal memory space so if you wanted a decent amount of games, you needed to either take the extra cost or constantly delete and redownload software.
If that’s not enough, PlayStation also made the bad decision to allow only one PSN account per machine. The only way the change to a new account was to reset the entire device. This was highly impractical for friends and families that wanted to share the console, not to mention import gamers that wanted to buy games from other regions’ PSN Stores (the EU store lacked so many games the US store had, especially with the PSP titles).
These were major hurdles for players who wanted to buy the Vita. To make this worse, in the years since its release, people have managed to mod the Vita and make it compatible with regular SD cards and swap accounts. Detrimental hardware choices like these would cost the console dearly in the long run.
The Games Library
The other big issue with the Vita was the games. There ultimately weren’t a lot of them and there weren’t a lot of “killer apps”. They say first impressions are the most important, and that’s certainly the case with new consoles. The Vita didn’t sell well which in turn meant that many developers and publishers didn’t want to make games for it which meant that it continued to lack the games that it needed to sell better.
That’s not to say that the PS Vita had no good games. The first two years of its life saw many classic PlayStation franchises reach the console. I’ve already mentioned Uncharted, but there was also LittleBig Planet, Resistance Burning Skies, and Kill Zone, not to mention some fantastic new IPs like the beautiful puzzle adventure game Gravity Rush and cult classic action RPG Soul Sacrifice.
Unfortunately, first-party support fizzled out after the first couple of years, particularly when PlayStation’s attention was turned to the PS4. The last major first-party release on the system was “Freedom Wars” an RPG developed by PlayStation Japan Studio. From there on the Vita primarily consisted of niche AA Japanese games and Indie titles.
Of course, I just so happened to love games like that so I was more than happy with these offerings. The Vita got a wide collection of JRPGs and visual novel-style games that weren’t as well suited for the more powerful home consoles. The major examples were Persona 4 Golden as well as the Western world’s first introduction to the Danganronpa series.
These didn’t exactly give the Vita “mass-market appeal” in a way that the 3DS and the now rapidly growing mobile market had but it did build a dedicated following that support the system to this day.
The Legacy of The Vita
PlayStation would end production of the Vita in 2019 but I can’t say many games were released for the device after 2016. At this point it was being advertised more as a peripheral for the PS4, allowing to users to stream PS4 games, a function that I don’t think many people actually used.
By 2017, Nintendo would release the Switch following the poor sales of their own previous console the Wii U. What’s interesting to me is that in some ways the Switch is more like a successor to the Vita than it is to the Wii U. It sold itself on the same idea as the Vita: portable HD gaming and it seemed to inherit Vita’s library of AA games and indie titles.
The main difference here is that the Switch used cheap SD cards for its memory storage and it had the full backing of Nintendo’s first-party IPs for its six years and counting. It even got an OLED model later on, very reminiscent of one of the PlayStation handheld’s most notable features.
The Touch of Life
Without the advancements of the PlayStation Vita, we might not even have a Switch or Steam Deck today, the system was truly ahead of its time. If it just had a couple of improvements, I think it could have had a much larger following and done far better in sales.
So many new handheld devices we see released nowadays, are doing more or less what Vita’s original concept was but with even higher graphics to allow PC games to be played from anywhere. The Vita may not have had the best life but it’s certainly left a legacy that continues to this day.
