While Sony doesn’t have much in terms of first-party games coming to the PlayStation Vita this holiday season – aside from Freedom Wars – Sony UK MD Fergal Gara revealed to Eurogamer that the system doesn’t sell nearly as well as the PlayStation 4, but he’s happy with how “robust and consistent” Vita sales are, and Minecraft could represent a huge boost:
It’s trucking along. It’s currently in year-on-year growth and enjoying a healthy year, and it’s about to hit its biggest and potentially most powerful release of the year, which is Minecraft. That could be an extraordinary release for Vita.
Mirroring what Shuhei Yoshida and Jim Ryan said earlier in the year, Gara admitted that titles like Uncharted or Killzone probably won’t come to the Vita ever again, adding, “But what we are excited by is the number of games we can take to the platform that have been created for other platforms.”
Calling Minecraft “a classic example” of a title from other platforms that is being brought to Vita, Gara continued:
We’ve got LEGO Batman 3 coming to Vita as well as PS4 and PS3. The multitude of digital titles that are proving attractive on the console, and the fact it is a substantially digital device – a big chunk of the sales come direct from the store to the device – the multitude of titles in the indie sector in particular we’ve done a lot of work with has proven popular, both in terms of affordability and their quirky nature, which seems to suit many of the consumers who are buying Vita. And also a bunch of younger gamer titles, which is another substantial niche.
Gara reiterated that they won’t be ignoring the Vita this Christmas, and they’re looking forward to another sales spike this holiday, because, as Sony discovered, “Its sales profile has over the last couple of years proven to be far more seasonal than, say PS3, and how PS4 will behave once we have another year under our belts.”
He also wanted to “absolutely assure” people that the Vita isn’t fading away, and it’s actually “proving remarkably resilient. We enter the peak season very optimistic about hitting similar or bigger numbers to last year. So we feel in good shape.”
Are you planning to get Minecraft on PlayStation Vita when it launches in a few weeks? (Reminder: buy the PS3 version of Minecraft to get the Vita version free, as well as the option to upgrade to PS4 for $5.)
[Source: Eurogamer]
