Shuhei Yoshida Reels Off List of Reasons the PS Vita Bombed

Shuhei Yoshida, a now-former PlayStation executive, has gone over a few reasons why the PS Vita wasn't as big a success as the company hoped.

Talking on Kinda Funny Games, he goes over a handful of technical reasons the handheld console failed before delving into what he believes is the main contributor to its downfall.

"There are multiple reasons why Vita didn't work," Yoshida says, recognising that it did work insofar as users loved it and loved playing games on it.

"Several technical choices we as a company made [weren't] really good ones," he says. "One of which was the dedicated proprietary memory cards — that was a mistake. People had to spend more money to get the memory cards."

He adds that the back touch panel was "not necessary" and "added additional costs to the hardware", as did the OLED screen, even if it was "beautiful".

Yoshida also reveals that the PS Vita dev kit featured a video out, which allowed developers to plug it into monitors and work on games for the device. However, this was removed for the final unit in order to "save a few cents of cost".

However, the "biggest reason" in his opinion is that Sony couldn't support the Vita with dedicated, first-party games. "We had to split all our resources into two different platforms. And we didn't have that resource," Yoshida explains.

"[PS Studios] had to decide which teams to work on which [platform], and we didn't have that big a talent pool to be able to support two different platforms. And of course, [home] console is the biggest platform; we had to support PS3 and the launch of PS4. Really we had to stop many projects on Vita because we didn't have teams to make PS4 games."

Yoshida also adds that the main reason he believes the Nintendo Switch has been so successful is because the company stopped supporting two platforms and focused on one, and it's hard to argue with that, so we totally get where he's coming from.

What are your thoughts on this? Has Shu identified all the Vita's key missteps? Discuss in the comments section below.

[source youtu.be]