Impending Death of the PS Vita?

I was playing my PS Vita last night and having a blast. It made me wonder, why is the Vita not a key pillar of Sony’s product offerings? What happened to this handheld that released with such hope and fanfare back in 2012?

When the Vita was released the hype was real, it was almost palatable. If you had a finger on the pulse of the industry at the time I’m sure that you remember reading all the fantastic reviews of the Vita. Kotaku hailed it as ‘the most capable handheld ever made’ and IGN said that the Vita ‘Delivered the best graphics of any handheld’

These stellar reviews are even more impressive if you take into account the fact that at the time the Vita was released, the Nintendo 3DS was less than a year old and was a media darling. By all accounts the Vita was impressive and full of potential.

Let’s not look at this through rose colored glasses though, there were some problems with the Vita in its first year. It was expensive ($299 for the 3G model and $249 for the Wi-fi model) and the 3G model required an expensive data plan, and lost battery life at an insane rate. That being said, the 3G model was quickly discontinued and the Vita did match the release price of the 3DS at $249.

Another positive in the court of the Vita was its pure power. In Layman’s terms it is somewhere between the PS2 and PS3 in terms of processing and graphical capabilities, and roughly twice as powerful as the 3DS. A perfect example of this power is Uncharted: Golden Abyss which amazed reviewers with its high graphical fidelity.

PS Vita Underperformed the Portable Gaming Market

There has been speculation that the rise of smart phone gamers has weakened the portable market. I wish that we could point to the demise of handheld gaming as the cause, but we cannot.

Last month, July 2016, the Nintendo 3DS sold 175,000 hardware units, and moved 170,000 copies of Monster Hunter Generations and almost as many copies of Pokemon Alpha Sapphire and Omega Ruby. These are very, very robust numbers. To put it in perspective, the Xbox 1 has been seeing fantastic sales numbers and in July it looks like it has moved under 175,000 units.

Unfortunately the slow lingering death of the Vita comes down to a few factors that could have been avoided with some forethought and care.

Poorly Ported Games by Major Developers

Many major developers are guilty of a crime against the Vita. They commissioned smaller studios to port their AAA games over to the Vita and gave them very limited time, and very limited budgets to make this happen. The result was distressing and shook the confidence of even the most diehard Vita fans.

Take the Vita port of Borderlands 2 for example. The graphical fidelity had to be reduced, which anyone would understand, but what was truly awful about this port was the frame rate. Now, for full disclosure, I am one of the rare people that is fine having a 30fps experience, so long as the frame rate does not dip down too low. Unfortunately in the case of the Borderlands 2 Vita port this is not the case. I was experiencing stuttering and frame rates that were in the single digits during intense combat.

Another example is Resident Evil Revelations 2 where the sound was compressed to the point of removing all atmosphere from the game, and the stuttering frame rate issues made the game almost unplayable. A second fantastic game reduced to a steaming pile of garbage on the Vita.

These issues were avoidable. The developers knew that they were releasing subpar experiences on the Vita. Anyone would be taken back by the issues presented above, and the Devs along with the Sony certification team, had a choice to fix these games or to release them in their nearly unplayable form, and it is clear what choice was made.

How do I know that these issues could have been fixed? Well let’s look at Uncharted: Golden Abyss it is a game of roughly the same scope as Borderlands 2 or Resident Evil Revelations 2 and it did not suffer from the same short comings.

Sure, it did have some frame rate slow downs, but nothing that would drop down below 30. This proves that with adequate time and budget these games could have been so much better. Hell, they could have even been playable. A decision was made somewhere along the line that prevented this from happening.

Slow Ports of  Good Games

Even the ports that are fantastic (and there are some) are usually very slow to be released on the Vita. For example Bastion was originally released in 2011 and did not make it to the Vita until 2015. Axiom Verge was released in 2015 and did not make it’s Vita debut until 2016. Hyper Light Drifter has been out since March 31^st 2016, and had a promise of a Vita port built in to their kickstarter. They have yet to make good on that promise.

You may be asking yourself, what does this matter? The games are making it to the Vita eventually after all. The problem is that this cannibalizes potential Vita sales. All of these games have been released on other platforms before the Vita – developers make this decision because they expect Vita sales to be low.

Perhaps the reason for the poor Vita sales is because people either purchase the game elsewhere, or by the time it is available they have already heard all there is to know about the game and are no longer interested. Either way, timely releases would make for a more profitable handheld.

Conclusion

So what is next for Sony’s handheld division? Overall the Vita has not performed exceptionally, but it has not been a flop. The Vita has sold around 4 million units to date, which is roughly as many units as the GBA sold back in the day. Is this enough for Sony to design, market, and sell a ‘Vita 2’?

I doubt it; I think that this will be the last Sony handheld that we see. I am upset that Sony did not insist upon quality and timeliness for Vita titles because I truly believe that would have made the system exceptional.

We have a few major releases left for the PS Vita, but after those are done in 2017 I see the Vita fading away by the end of next year. It will be a sad day for handheld gamers as we lament what could have been.