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Much has been written about why the PS Vita failed, with its high cost, lack of exclusives and pointless features being cited whenever the conversation comes around. What makes its commercial performance all the more puzzling is that its predecessor, the PSP, sold over 75 million units – so what went wrong?
Former Sony Interactive CEO Shawn Layden has some ideas. He's been speaking to PSI about his time at the company, and he thinks Sony should have iterated on the PSP rather than trying something new with the PS Vita, which famously had a rear touch panel, an OLED display, and camera functionality.
"I wouldn't be the first one to say it, but instead of the Vita, we should have made PSP 2," he says. "And for PSP 2, we just wanted one more stick. One more analog stick. That's all we needed."
While the PS Vita did offer that extra stick, Layden thinks the additional features simply drove up the cost without adding any value. The OLED panel, which came at a time when such screens were still quite expensive, didn't make a big enough of a difference, he says.
"Back touch was a weird thing, which a lot of people couldn't get their head around," he adds. "And if you were bringing a game from Game Boy, let's say, onto Vita, all of that back touch input was meaningless. I don't know why that was true. And that added cost."
However, Layden says that "the biggest strategic mistake was the proprietary memory stick," echoing comments from another ex-Sony legend, Shuhei Yoshida. Unlike the 3DS, which used SD cards, the PS Vita had its own memory format.
"Back on PlayStation 2, when you had to buy the 8mb for PlayStation 2 memory card, [that] was a huge revenue and profit earner for the company. No one had memory cards or anything that looked like that around the house. By the time Vita came out, we all had a drawer full of SD cards. Because you buy a digital camera, you buy a digital phone, you buy anything, you got an SD card with it. So people had these cards at home, but we were forcing them to buy another proprietary card."
He concludes that those "product planning mistakes" with the hardware cost the PS Vita its chance to carry on the PSP's good work – and, just to prove he's speaking from experience, he reveals in the same interview that he carries a PSP Go in his bag.
"Honest to God truth, I still carry my PSP Go. I play Everybody's Golf. It's the perfect game for that format."