Forum - View topicNEWS: Sony Officially Ends PS Vita Shipments in Japan
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Mocha Shiori
 Posts: 72 Location: The United States |
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So it's finally ending huh? I never got myself a Vita, but it always seemed pretty fun so I'm sad to see it's going to end very soon.
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GeorgeC
Posts: 795 |
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You DON'T see the irony in what you just said?
THAT'S why the system died. A bunch of people thought it was neat hardware but nobody bought it! |
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R. Kasahara
 Posts: 704 |
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The PS Vita was neat hardware, and it had some neat-looking games, too! However, the proprietary memory cards for the thing were outrageously expensive, which turned a lot of people off.
The Switch has been getting a fair number of Vita ports (about a third of my current Switch library is made up of them) and hopefully this continues. There's so many niche titles I'd been wanting to try that are, or were, Vita exclusives. |
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levonr
 Posts: 820 |
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The Vita came out 8 years ago and it did ok in Japan which is why it lasted this long. However it really failed in the west with very few AAA games. Kinda reminds me of the Sega Saturn in that way.
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doctordoom85
 Posts: 2093 |
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Wait, really? I mean, I've got a Vita so I don't really need to double-dip for the portability factor but I'm curious which ones you mean. I know PS4 got ports of Gravity Rush, Tearaway, Danganronpa 1 and 2, and Zero Escape: VLR, but I didn't know Switch had gotten any Vita games. |
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R. Kasahara
Posts: 704 |
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The Switch games I have which were originally released on Vita (at least in Japan) are Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk, The Longest Five Minutes, Nightshade (Japanese physical release with English subs), Penny-Punching Princess, and Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana. A few of those have gotten PC releases as well. |
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I_Drive_DSM
 Posts: 217 |
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I to this day will not understand Sony's initial stance on the proprietary formats they used first for the PSP and then into the Vita. PSP's UMD format did help with piracy but no body outside of a few movies that went to the console used the format. The choice to use the Memory Stick Duo was also a bad proprietary idea when you had to pay so much money early on for a stick that had any sort of suitable memory. It seems like the lessons that should have been taught there never caught on and Sony just continued as they normally do with the Vita. And for sure there are other handhelds that have proprietary like Nintendo but at least they offered backwards comparability. For the Vita the only way you were playing a PSP title was if you bought it digitally.
I don't know what would have saved it here but I always thought one thing that may have strengthened it in the US market was where possible such as when a title had both a PS4 and Vita version Sony should have bundled a Vita download with a physical game. I think this would have given some incentives for gamers because as many individuals who own a Vita are going to own a PS4 it's almost like a win-win for buyers. Not everyone can remote play a PS4 in all situations but you can carry a Vita around. Also like the PSP I feel the niche' titles came about a little too late. Very late in the PSP's life we all of a sudden got a lot of games from Japan that had almost been on a back burner of sorts, and by that time it was rather late for them.
The Sega Saturn 'failed' in the US primarily of Bernard Stolar's stance on games at the time. It's reported he heavily despised 2D titles, especially RPGs, and having came from Sony in the early days of the Playstation thought the only way the Saturn could effectively compete was with similar 3D hardware. There were two big issues. (1) First was sans SEGA 1st party titles most 3rd party developers developed games for both Saturn and PS1, with critics often giving the later better reviews than the Saturn (there were maybe only a good handful of cases where the Saturn really performed better than the same PS1 title). (2) Second was Stolar eventually insisted on a five star policy for US market Saturn titles, most of which 2D titles and RPGs of any sort had difficulty competing with (Vic Ireland of Working Designs was often vocal about the Saturn standard for games). A lot of this came to head at two situations; when FF7 came to the US and E3 in '97. JPRGs absolutely blew up after 1997, and with SEGA of Amer. not having any solid alternatives to the onslaught of PS1 titles coming in simply couldn't compete. SOA also kicked out Working Designs from the 97 E3 booth, which was a big F you to third party publishers. The irony is the Sega Saturn in Japan had a MASSIVE library, and it continued well towards Y2K. Had SOA focused on the more niche' offerings with the Saturn, rather than trying to compete directly with Sony's Playstation, they could have presented the Saturn in almost it's own market of sort offering the types of games Saturn did very well; puzzlers, shooters, visual novels, and the multitudes of shovelware that went to the console (SEGA held a lot of IPs in the 90s). Instead it fought the PS1 and lost. |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 6273 |
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Which to be fair doesn't have the problem the 3DS has where if you bought a title digitally and something happened to your system you'd have to buy the game again on a new system.
They did this with Sly Cooper 4 where if you bought either the PS3 or Vita version of the game you got a download code for the other version. Presumably wouldn't have worked out with the fact that Sony would've effectively been making two versions of a game and selling the vita one essentially for free which is also why I think many of the other publishers didn't do it either. |
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OtherSideofSky
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I own two Vitas and love both of them, but man could Sony have handled it better over the years. Those absurd memory card prices made taking full advantage of its digital library prohibitively expensive, the Vita Playstation Store has tons of issues (like some games only appearing if you search for them by name, and not being able to filter DLC out of search results) and none of the functionality had it with the PS3 carried forward to the PS4. And of course it suffered from the fact that Sony has literally never designed a good OS UI.
I've had a lot of fun with the Vita, but it never managed to top the PSP 3000 or GO for me, and the Switch has come to feel like an improvement on it in basically every way. |
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Cecilthedarkknight_234
 Posts: 3820 Location: Louisville, KY |
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As a Vita owner this is sad news but blunt as well. The Vita could never capture the market like the PSP did for Sony not matter how hard the system tried it just couldn't catch a break.
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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With the rise in smartphone/app games, handheld gaming as a separate game industry itself was starting to become obsolete, except for what Nintendo Switch promoted: Games that could be console or portable, not require buying two different purchases, and not risking crossover game experience between one and the other. (Of course, Sega invented it years ago with a handheld that was large enough to plug in Genesis cartridges, but the SegaCD was coming along, and that was near the end for the Genesis.) If Sony wants to keep a foothold in the handheld market (which has already been up-and-down for them), that may be the direction most of the companies may go in the next few years. |
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