PlayStation Vita
Rumors of a successor to the PlayStation Portable emerged in July 2009 when Eurogamer reported that Sony was working on such a device. The report claimed the new hardware would utilize the PowerVR SGX543MP processor and perform at a level similar to the original Xbox. By mid-2010, websites continued running stories about accounts of the existence of a PSP 2. Reports arose during the Tokyo Game Show that the device was unveiled internally during a private meeting held at Sony Computer Entertainment's headquarters in Aoyama, Tokyo. Shortly after, reports of development kits for the handheld had reportedly already been shipped to numerous video game developers including both first-party and third-party developers to start making games for the device. This report was later confirmed by Mortal Kombat Executive Producer Shaun Himmerick. In November, Senior Vice President of Electronic Arts, Patrick Soderlund, confirmed that he had seen that the PlayStation Portable successor existed but could not confirm details. VG247 released pictures of an early prototype version showing a PSP Go-like slide-screen design along with two analog sticks, two cameras and a microphone. The report mentioned that overheating issues had since caused them to move away from the design in favor of a model more similar to the original PlayStation Portable device. Throughout 2010, Sony would not confirm these reports of a PSP successor but would make comments regarding making future hardware. Shuhei Yoshida, President of SCE Worldwide Studios revealed that his studio had a continued role in future hardware development at the time. In December, Sony Computer Entertainment CEO Kazuo Hirai stated that Sony aimed to appeal to a wide demographic of people by using multiple input methods on future hardware. Buttons and joysticks were intended for traditional handheld game system users, while touchscreens were designed for smart phone users. The device was officially announced by Sony on the 27th of January 2011, at their PlayStation Meeting press conference held by the company in Japan. The system, only known by its code name Next Generation Portable, was announced to be a handheld gaming device that aimed for PlayStation 3 quality visuals. David Coombes, platform research manager at Sony Computer Entertainment America, clarified that it was not going to run at 2 GHz because the battery would last five minutes and it would probably set fire to your pants. Its power was later described by Sony engineers as about halfway between the PSP and PS3. As rumors had suggested, the device was designed to present the best of both worlds between mobile and handheld gaming. It included a 5-inch OLED touchscreen, a rear touchpad coupled with physical buttons and dual analog sticks. Sony also revealed that the device would be using a mix of retail and digital distribution of games. Further details were announced at Game Developers Conference 2011, including that Sony would be dropping the PSP's UMD disc format in favor of small game cartridges of 2 GB or 4 GB size variants. Along with two cameras, facial detection, head detection and tracking capabilities were added.
The original model of the handheld includes an OLED multi-touch capacitive touchscreen, a rear touchpad, two analog joysticks, and front and shoulder push-button input. The system supports Bluetooth and Wi-Fi as standard while a variant model was sold with an additional 3G modem. The Vita features a quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore CPU and a quad-core SGX543MP GPU. The internal battery has between 3 to 5 hours of power for game playing depending on the processing power required for the game, screen brightness, sound level and network connections. Additionally, the battery can supply about five hours for video watching and up to nine hours of music listening with the screen off. Other hardware includes stereo speakers, a microphone, built-in Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 2.1+EDR connectivity, and two cameras. The cameras are both 0.3 megapixel and run at 640 by 480 pixels at 60 frames per second. They can be used to take photos or videos using built-in applications on the system. The platform also launched with a model with 3G mobile data support which required a separate data plan through a data provider. The 3G service was partnered with NTT DoCoMo in Japan, AT&T in the US, Rogers in Canada and Vodafone in Europe and Australia. The 3G model was discontinued in 2013 and not made available in the system's future revised models. Internally, the device features a custom system on chip with a quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processor and a quad-core GPU SGX543MP4+. Sony stated that the Vita generally runs well under its full clock speed but due to overheating and battery consumption issues that would ensue, Sony placed its processing power around halfway between the current PSP and the PS3. The PlayStation Vita has 512 MB of system RAM and 128 MB of VRAM. The amount of RAM allows cross-game chat to be used on the system. Software for the PlayStation Vita is distributed on a proprietary flash memory card called PlayStation Vita game card rather than on Universal Media Discs as used by the PlayStation Portable. The shape and size of the card itself is very similar to an SD card. Five to 10 percent of the game card's space is reserved for game save data and patches. The PS Vita is incompatible with standard memory cards such as SD cards and instead stores data on proprietary PS Vita memory cards which are available in sizes of 4 GB, 8 GB, 16 GB, 32 GB and 64 GB. Initially, a maximum of 100 applications and games can be stored on the device at time regardless of data storage available. When the limit is reached, applications or games must be moved or deleted in order to access those beyond the limit. This limit was later raised to 500 applications in system software version 3.10 released in 2014. Due to the high price of official Sony memory cards, inexpensive third-party SD2Vita adapter cards which allow the use of commodity micro SD storage media in conjunction with a modified console appeared on the market.
The sales of the Vita started strong at launch but then stalled and greatly underperformed. The Vita had a strong launch in Japan selling over 300,000 units in its first week of availability though figures shortly afterwards shrunk down 78% to under 73,000 sold in its second week. It then settled into about 12,000 sold per week in the following weeks. Similarly, in the United States, the system debuted with 200,000 units sold in the first month before slinking down into an amount of about 50,000 a month. 1.2 million units were reported as sold as of the 26th of February 2012 after it had launched in most regions. The system continued to get high-profile games over the course of 2012 including Gravity Rush, LittleBigPlanet PS Vita, Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, Persona 4 Golden, Assassin's Creed III: Liberation, and Call of Duty: Black Ops: Declassified. Despite this, the system still only managed to sell 4 million units worldwide in its first 10 months on the market. Analysts estimated that it was at 6 million units sold after two years of availability. After 2012, Sony ceased releasing direct sales figures of the Vita instead opting to release combined sales figures with it and the PSP. Still, the system under-performed while Sony projected selling 16 million units of combined Vita and PSP systems. They had to slash their forecast twice in the same year down to 12 and then 10 million units sold. With higher-profile games not pushing the system sales enough in 2012, big third-party companies like Ubisoft and Activision started reducing or eliminating support for the system especially in the West. Additionally, while the Monster Hunter series had significantly boosted the sales of the PSP, its absence instead hurt the Vita. Its developer, Capcom, had decided to release Monster Hunter Tri and future Monster Hunter games exclusively on the Nintendo 3DS where it would sell millions of copies for Sony's main competitor. The device is considered to have sold fairly well in Japan and still a crucial part of Sony's overall strategy in the region. It reached 5 million units sold in 2016 according to sales tracker Media Create. By mid-2017, Glixel estimated the Vita userbase to be around 15 million. At the time of the announcement in September 2018, USgamer estimated that the Vita userbase had grown to approximately 16 million units.
With support diminishing, Shahid Ahmad, Sony's Director of Strategic Content, began a new approach to software through directly reaching out to and making accommodations for smaller independent developers who had previously released games for mobile and PC platforms. While not completely reversing the sales trends of the Vita, the lower costs of making or porting smaller-budget games made it easier for developers to make a profit on the system's smaller userbase. Fez, Spelunky, Hotline Miami, and OlliOlli all found success with releases on Vita. Ahmad also maintained interest in the device by directly interacting with consumers on social media. The game Tales of Hearts R was localized into English only because it was number one in a survey of games desired on the platform. Sony continued to support the system with games through 2013 as well albeit lesser so with titles such as Killzone: Mercenary and Tearaway along with a handful of other Western-developed ports such as FIFA 13 and Rayman Legends. In Japan no such measures were necessary as the Vita maintained moderate hardware sales. Strong support by Japanese developers also helped with companies such as Bandai Namco, Falcom, Koei Tecmo, 5pb, Compile Heart, Spike Chunsoft, and Atlus releasing many games in the JRPG and visual novels genre to help keep a steady flow of mid-level releases coming to the system. Big games such as Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster sold well and roughly in-line with their home console counterparts. The heavier support from Japan in turn also helped support the system in the West as well with many games in the Atelier, Ys, Danganronpa, Persona, and Trails series localized into English on the Vita or made playable through the system's backward compatibility with digital PSP games. While the focus on indie games kept the device afloat in the West, the platform stalled in 2017 upon the release of the Nintendo Switch though niche support through indie games and JRPGs continued into the year.
Towards the end of 2013 around the launch of Sony's next video game device the home video game console the PlayStation 4, Sony began making comments in regard to the change in focus with the Vita. Yoshida stated that Sony would be releasing fewer first party games for the platform. Sony Computer Entertainment's Product Planning & Platform Software Innovation Director Don Mesa stated that the economics simply don't work with the traditional process. Sony addressed the economics of Vita game development issue with beginning on focusing on the fact that almost all PlayStation 4 games could be streamed and played through a Vita through Remote Play. Sony attempted to attach the device to the PS4 due to its extreme popularity. It took only a few weeks for the sales to surpass the sales of the Vita over the course of almost two years. In July 2014, Yoshida stated that the company would focus on it less as a dedicated handheld video game console and more on its combination of uses. He said it is not about individual Vita games anymore but how Vita can have multiple uses with PS4 Remote Play, PS3 games with PS Now, and the dedicated games. The whole ecosystem with PS4 at the center makes the Vita a part of that. Open beta trials for PlayStation Now functionality on the PS Vita began on the 14th of October 2014 in North America. The PlayStation TV released across late 2013 and 2014 also aimed to expand the system's userbase by allowing for Vita games to be played on a television like a home console though the device was discontinued in the West by the end of 2015. In November 2014, SCEA president Shawn Layden suggested that the new approach was working on hardware level stating that Vita sales had increased since the implementation of PS4 Remote Play though he and another Sony representative did not give specific figures. The last major Sony-developed title Freedom Wars still found success selling over 188,000 copies in its first week of release in Japan.
In September 2015, Yoshida stated that Sony had no current plans for a Vita successor stating that climate is not healthy for now because of the huge dominance of mobile gaming. At E3 2015, he had stated that Sony would not be making any more AAA big budget games to the system but by October the comment had been revised that Sony would not be making any more games for it at all. Reasons cited included the company focusing on supporting the PS4 and the fact that it felt that third party Japanese developers and Western indie developers were sufficiently supporting the device. In March 2016, Sony announced that instead it would be forming a new company Forward Works and be instead concentrating on bringing PlayStation-based games to mobile platforms like iOS and Android. Despite Sony's focus on the PS4 and mobile for the future, the Vita still continued to receive substantial third-party company game support in the way of Japanese-style role-playing games and visual novels and Western-style indie video games through 2017. Minecraft in particular was successful for the platform with it selling over 1.2 million physical copies in Japan alone as of September 2017. The March 2017 launch of the Nintendo Switch which operates on a similar concept of providing high budget video games on a portable unit further overshadowed the Vita though niche support through indie games and JRPGs continued into the year. On the 20th of September 2018, Sony announced at Tokyo Game Show 2018 that the Vita would be discontinued in 2019 ending its hardware production. Production of new physical Vita games in Europe and America ceased by the end of Sony's 2018 fiscal year which ended on the 31st of March 2019. Production of Vita hardware officially ended on the 1st of March 2019. In March 2021, Sony announced that the Vita's online storefront would be closing on the 27th of August 2021 making it impossible to purchase digital games for the platform though still allowing for the download of previously purchased games.
The device sold 1.2 million units as of the end of February 2012 and 4 million by the end of 2012. It was only estimated by analysts to have reached 6 million by the end of 2013 figures that have not been confirmed due to Sony's ceasing to release Vita sales figures after hitting the 4 million mark at the end of 2012. Overall, Sony fell far short of the worldwide sales targets of 10 million Vitas sold by the end of March 2013. Views on the hardware dropped to more moderate levels in 2013 after the platform's initial sales lulls. Surveys in Japan showed that consumers were not purchasing the device due to its high retail price and perceived lack of software variety. Current Vita owners only showed a 46% rate of approval for the device and its software library. Similarly many Western critics felt that the low sales through 2013 would lead to an early death for the product. From 2013 onward, Sony was able to reverse the trajectory of the system by changing focus aiming to be more of a niche product than one with mass market appeal. They focused more on small Western mobile phone games and mid-level Japanese developed games while attaching it to the rise of popularity of its PlayStation 4 platform with its remote play connectivity functions. In 2018, Sony announced there would be no successor to the Vita/PSP line of handhelds. With the success of the Nintendo Switch and Steam Deck handhelds moving into the 2020s, publications questioned Sony's decision to abandon the market. In 2023, Sony announced Project Q, a controller with an 8-inch screen for the PlayStation 5 that would replicate the experience of remote play on a Vita or Off-TV Play of the Wii U GamePad. The product was later named PlayStation Portal and was released on the 15th of November 2023.
Common questions
When was the PlayStation Vita officially announced?
The PlayStation Vita was officially announced by Sony on the 27th of January 2011 at their PlayStation Meeting press conference held in Japan. The system was initially known by its code name Next Generation Portable and aimed to deliver PlayStation 3 quality visuals.
What are the hardware specifications of the original PlayStation Vita model?
The original PlayStation Vita includes a quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore CPU, a quad-core SGX543MP GPU, 512 MB of system RAM, and 128 MB of VRAM. It features a 5-inch OLED touchscreen, dual analog sticks, front and shoulder buttons, two 0.3 megapixel cameras, stereo speakers, and a microphone.
How many units did the PlayStation Vita sell during its first year of availability?
The PlayStation Vita sold 1.2 million units as of the end of February 2012 and reached 4 million units by the end of 2012. Analysts estimated that sales reached 6 million units after two years of availability, though Sony ceased releasing direct sales figures after hitting the 4 million mark.
When did Sony announce the discontinuation of the PlayStation Vita?
Sony announced on the 20th of September 2018 at Tokyo Game Show 2018 that the PlayStation Vita would be discontinued in 2019. Production of new physical games ceased by the end of Sony's 2018 fiscal year which ended on the 31st of March 2019, and hardware production officially ended on the 1st of March 2019.
Why was the PlayStation Vita considered to have underperformed compared to sales targets?
The PlayStation Vita underperformed because it faced high retail prices, perceived lack of software variety, and strong competition from mobile gaming and the Nintendo Switch. Sony projected selling 16 million combined units for the Vita and PSP but had to slash forecasts twice down to 10 million units sold due to these market conditions.