Sure, the Vita might have one of the biggest launch lineups in history, but that doesn’t really matter in the long run – what’s most important is what you’ll be playing on your Vita four, five or even ten years from now. With the PSP, the handheld quickly suffered a severe lack of releases not just from third parties but from Sony themselves, a mistake they promise not to make with the Vita.
Gamasutra talked to Scott Rohde, Senior Vice President of Sony’s Worldwide Studios, about how the PSP had suffered from a lack of content, and whether the Vita’s release line-up was too front loaded:
No, not at all. I think that there are some that argue that we may even have too much lined up at launch, but I know we’ve got a lot more in the works.
Again, referencing what you talked about for PSP, I think that there were too many droughts of killer titles. There were too many long droughts, and I think we recognized that. And we’ve put a serious investment into our long-term PS Vita plans, so there’s a lot of stuff in the works.
Rohde also explained what went wrong with the PSP:
Man, I could probably talk about that for three hours all by itself. But again, I think what was special about PSP in relation to Sony was it was the first time that Sony, as a company, was trying to support two platforms at once. So that, by its very nature, made that launch a little bit rocky. We still did okay. We got some good games out the door.
I think the point you’re making is a lot of the better games came in the first two or three years of the lifecycle of that machine, but there weren’t a lot of amazing killer games that launched. And this time around, we started planning for development of this machine about three years ago, in terms of developing for the software, and how we were going to be able to transition.
We still had some teams finishing up their PS2 lifecycle, a lot of teams building on PSP, the bulk of our resources on PS3. But we started creating a nice transition plan to get some of our top teams onto Vita.
And in addition to that, we had very distinctly different meetings with the hardware creators, so we were heavily involved in the design of the machine, the way it feels, the fact that we all stomped our feet and insisted that this thing have two analog sticks.
If we’re going to create a hardcore machine, for hardcore gamers, it absolutely had to have those two sticks. That was square one, right? So we definitely learned a lot from the PSP, and I think we definitely resolved a lot of those problems, moving into this cycle.
It’s obviously great to hear that there is a concrete roadmap in place for the Vita’s future lineup, and with developers calling it an incredibly easy platform to work on, hopefully it won’t suffer the same delays that disrupted the PS3’s roadmap.
What would you like to be playing on the Vita in six years time? Speculate in the comments below.
