Read from time extension:
Former Sony Interactive CEO Shawn Layden has some ideas. He's been speaking to PSI about his time at the company, and he thinks Sony should have iterated on the PSP rather than trying something new with the PS Vita, which famously had a rear touch panel, an OLED display, and camera functionality.
"I wouldn't be the first one to say it, but instead of the Vita, we should have made PSP 2," he says. "And for PSP 2, we just wanted one more stick. One more analog stick. That's all we needed."
While the PS Vita did offer that extra stick, Layden thinks the additional features simply drove up the cost without adding any value. The OLED panel, which came at a time when such screens were still quite expensive, didn't make a big enough of a difference, he says.
"Back touch was a weird thing, which a lot of people couldn't get their head around," he adds. "And if you were bringing a game from Game Boy, let's say, onto Vita, all of that back touch input was meaningless. I don't know why that was true. And that added cost."
However, Layden says that "the biggest strategic mistake was the proprietary memory stick," echoing comments from another ex-Sony legend, Shuhei Yoshida. Unlike the 3DS, which used SD cards, the PS Vita had its own memory format.
"Back on PlayStation 2, when you had to buy the 8mb for PlayStation 2 memory card, [that] was a huge revenue and profit earner for the company. No one had memory cards or anything that looked like that around the house. By the time Vita came out, we all had a drawer full of SD cards. Because you buy a digital camera, you buy a digital phone, you buy anything, you got an SD card with it. So people had these cards at home, but we were forcing them to buy another proprietary card."
Former Sony Interactive CEO Shawn Layden has some ideas. He's been speaking to PSI about his time at the company, and he thinks Sony should have iterated on the PSP rather than trying something new with the PS Vita, which famously had a rear touch panel, an OLED display, and camera functionality.
"I wouldn't be the first one to say it, but instead of the Vita, we should have made PSP 2," he says. "And for PSP 2, we just wanted one more stick. One more analog stick. That's all we needed."
While the PS Vita did offer that extra stick, Layden thinks the additional features simply drove up the cost without adding any value. The OLED panel, which came at a time when such screens were still quite expensive, didn't make a big enough of a difference, he says.
"Back touch was a weird thing, which a lot of people couldn't get their head around," he adds. "And if you were bringing a game from Game Boy, let's say, onto Vita, all of that back touch input was meaningless. I don't know why that was true. And that added cost."
However, Layden says that "the biggest strategic mistake was the proprietary memory stick," echoing comments from another ex-Sony legend, Shuhei Yoshida. Unlike the 3DS, which used SD cards, the PS Vita had its own memory format.
"Back on PlayStation 2, when you had to buy the 8mb for PlayStation 2 memory card, [that] was a huge revenue and profit earner for the company. No one had memory cards or anything that looked like that around the house. By the time Vita came out, we all had a drawer full of SD cards. Because you buy a digital camera, you buy a digital phone, you buy anything, you got an SD card with it. So people had these cards at home, but we were forcing them to buy another proprietary card."
