Yesterday, we let you know about Shuhei Yoshida agreeing with the statement that there would be fewer first-party PlayStation Vita games going forward, with the focus now turning to indies, third-party developers, and Remote Play.
In a completely separate interview at E3, Metro caught up with Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE) President Jim Ryan. After emphatically saying “no!” when asked if Sony had given up on the PlayStation Vita, Ryan revealed that future big budget first-party PS Vita games are unlikely:
Are you going to see huge, mega budget PS Vita games that we have developed and we publish? I think that’s unlikely. That said, does Vita play an increasingly important role in our overall ecosystem… the old vertical silos where nothing ever talked to each other, that’s all breaking down now.
Whether it’s PlayStation Now, whether it’s Remote Play… where the statistics are really surprising in terms of the number of people who use the Remote Play functionality and the extent to which they use it. It’s not like they use it once and then they say, ‘Okay, that’s great’ and then they put the PS Vita back in the drawer.
Probed further for a specific percentage on the amount of people using Remote Play, Ryan replied, “It’s double digits, so it does work. It will be a client device for PlayStation Now, and even potentially quite an important one. So in the sense it was initially intended – having huge, portable, exclusively-designed portable games – is that its future? Probably not. But does it have a future? Yes.”
Additionally, Ryan was asked about when we might hear news about PlayStation Now in Europe: “We’ll have a chat at gamescom [in August] and we might be able to talk about that some more then.”
