Lack of AAA Games on Vita is Tough, But Sony Has a Plan

PlayStation Vita sales were nothing impressive upon its release, selling fewer units than its PlayStation Portable predecessor the first Christmas week on the market, but Sony has plans in mind to still make the Vita more of a success.

Director of product planning and platform software innovation at Sony Computer Entertainment America, Don Mesa, addressed a fan’s comment on a PlayStation blog regarding better development of AAA games for Vita. Mesa said that the “economics simply don’t work” with the current model.

“We have to do something different to get AAA games on Vita. We accomplished it to a certain degree by making PS4 games work on Vita via remote play,” Mesa said. “PS Now will be another way, streaming PS3 games on Vita. I can’t wait until PS Now is out on Vita – I hope you’ll try out the experience and let me know what you think.”

PlayStation Now was revealed earlier this year and is intended to launch this summer. The service will allow PS4 and PS Vita users the ability to stream PS3 games on their consoles.

Time will tell whether this new service will increase PS Vita’s popularity amongst gamers looking for handheld consoles, but achieving success in the market is more difficult than ever. Sony’s PlayStation UK managing director, Fergal Gara, told Play that sales of the Vita weren’t what was expected.

“The PSP and Vita landed into considerably different worlds,” he said. “As far as the Vita is concerned, the advent of handheld gaming on phone and tablets complicated the marketplace. While we believe that the Vita is a specialist device that does the job better than other alternatives, people can only carry so many devices – and the people that want the very specialist experience is not as large as the pool of people that just want any gaming experience available to them on the go.”

Gara said that while the Vita is not expected to reach the same level of sales success as the PSP, its “new role with the PS4 has only just begun.”