It's been a while since we've heard from Jack Tretton. After leaving Sony in 2014, we haven't really heard much from the former CEO. IGN managed to track him down to talk about his tenure with Sony and the PlayStation brand, where Tretton shared some thoughts about the PlayStation Vita handheld. It's no secret that the handheld hasn't done too well. In fact, Sony even officially dropped all first party support for the system last year to focus solely on the PlayStation 4.
Tretton admitted that the internal feeling about the PlayStation Vita was that it was a "great machine," but it was just released too late for Sony to do much of anything with it. Although Sony initially planned on the Vita taking on mobile gaming, it was ultimately late to the party and mobile games had already taken hold. The world was already shifting its focus from dedicated handhelds to gaming on phones and tablets, although Nintendo's managed to maintain steady 3DS sales.
Despite the lack of success for the Vita, Tretton was quick to highlight the success of the PSP. The Vita unfortunately just happened to release when mobile gaming was on the rise. Being restricted to super expensive, proprietary memory cards to save all your data certainly didn't help matters, but the former SCEA CEO didn't reference that issue as one of the possible reasons why Sony's latest handheld didn't go over so well.
The 3DS did well, and it was released around the same time.
Sony seems to be a big part of the reason that it failed.
Yet I do wonder why some companies only develop exclusively for that. Surely you target the highest selling or most accessible thing first. I know the Vita is more powerful but in terms of a market, the 3DS will be more likely to get you sales.
I can't recall Sony pushing the console that much. They seem to have given up on it.
Sony should have started trying more when the 3DS was not doing so well, but I guess that they saw its troubles then as a sign that portable consoles weren't going to be able to do well in general against other portable platforms.
Obviously, that wasn't true, and all that they did by giving up was waste a great opportunity and abandon several million of their customers...
They only pulled back when the system was already in decline. (Hard for a system to kick off when you have no games.)
While third party support is okay the Vita was never given a fair chance.
There were quite a few things wrong with the PS Vita besides the kind of memory card it used.
Monster Hunter then went over to the 3DS for the 4th iteration, and guess what the Vita didn't do anywhere close to the numbers that PSP did despite bringing over Uncharted and other big hitters at first. People don't want to play a scaled down version of Uncharted, they want to play games that belong on a handheld.