Shuhei Yoshida is parting company with Sony after over 30 years and has been speaking to Kinda Funny Games about his amazing career.
One of the topics that came up was the PS Vita, one of Sony's most notable hardware flops. Despite offering amazing power and a great design, the system failed to compete with the Nintendo 3DS and is estimated to have sold around 10 to 15 million units – a dismal return when you consider the PSP sold over 80 million.
Yoshida has given his opinion on why PS Vita failed to capture the market in the same way its predecessor did, with one of the key reasons behind development resources.
He points out that development teams were split between the Vita and Sony's home consoles, and that the company simply didn't have enough studios to cover both. As a result, PS4 development took priority.
Yoshida acknowledges that Nintendo's approach with Switch – which was to combine its home console and handheld development teams – is one of the key reasons for the system's success.
He also feels that proprietary memory cards were a bad idea – something that Vita fans will almost certainly agree with:
That was a mistake. People have to spend more money to get the memory card.
The higher-capacity cards cost a fortune but were almost essential if you wanted to download loads of games. Using industry-standard SD cards would have been a much better approach (Nintendo did this with its 3DS console).
Yoshida also adds that the Vita's rear touch panel, which felt "so good" during the prototype phase, was "not necessary" and increased the cost of the console – as did the OLED panel, which was swapped out for an LCD one in later revisions.
He also hints that the console's lack of TV-out harmed sales – an admission that carries weight when you consider the success of Nintendo's hybrid Switch console. The Vita development kit had TV-out, but Yoshida says it was removed for the final production model:
In the development hardware for Vita, it had a video out so a developer can connect to screen and develop games on and somehow, the team decided to take that feature out from the consumer unit to save a few cents.