We only have a couple of short months before the amazing PS Vita launches here in North America. In the meantime, SCEE president Jim Ryan offers his thoughts on why the PSP was less than stellar and why the Vita will succeed.
The PSP was hailed as a multimedia device, which may have been its undoing, according to Ryan. “I think with PSP we tried to position it as a rather broad multimedia device. We talked a lot in the early days of PSP about its video playback functionality its use as a music device and a host of other multimedia functionality that it had.
I think this time we’ve realized that perhaps ended up confusing consumers, and they weren’t quite sure what the device was really all about. So this time the Vita does all of that stuff that we talked about on PSP, and it does it a lot better.”
However, this isn’t to say that the Vita is a slouch in the multimedia department. It will still function as a broad multimedia device…and then some. However, Sony’s focus will be on games.
“We’ve been a lot more single minded and much more focused in our positioning of Vita. We’re saying that this is primarily a gaming device. It has been developed from the ground up as a gaming device. What it does best is play games.
The other thing would be that we learned that what consumers didn’t really appreciate [about PSP] was, in many cases, getting ports of PS2 and then PS3 games for their PSP.
They said if that’s what you’re going to do, I’ll just play the game on PS2 or PS3. We’re helped here by the nature of the interfaces that are available on the Vita. What we learned is that the gaming experiences need to be unique and differentiated for gamers to be able to get into them.”
The PS Vita will release in North America on February 22, 2012.
SOURCE | CVG