‘We didn’t have resources’: Former PlayStation boss explains why Vita struggled, and what could be next

Former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida has explained why he believes the PS Vita was not successful for Sony, and shared his opinion on whether Sony should launch a new handheld gaming platform.

PS Vita was launched in 2011 as the successor to the PSP. However, despite being generally well-received by critics and some beloved games like Tearaway and Gravity Rush, it’s thought to have sold less than 15 million units before its discontinuation in 2019 – 65 million fewer than its predecessor.

Speaking in his first interview since quitting Sony this month, Yoshida – who was in charge of PlayStation’s first-party studios from 2008 to 2019 – told Kinda Funny he believed there were “multiple reasons why Vita didn’t work”. In the same interview, Yoshida discussed Sony’s push into live service games, and why Bloodborne isn’t on PS5 yet.

“Several technical choices we made as a company didn’t really [turn out as] good ones, one of which was dedicated memory cards: you had to purchase a proprietary memory card [and] that was a mistake, [because] people had to spend more money to get a memory card,” he said.

“The back touchpad was not necessary,” he added. “Teams made amazing prototypes that felt so good, that misled everyone involved that it would be great. But the back touch was not, and it added additional cost to the hardware.”

Yoshida said that, despite also adding cost, he thought the Vita’s OLED screen was “beautiful”. However, he highlighted one feature that had been cut to reduce price: a video out option.

“The one feature the team had in the development hardware dev kit for Vita was a video out, so developers could connect to a screen to develop games on,” he explained. “Somehow, the hardware team decided to take this feature out of the consumer unit… just to save a few cents of cost from the hardware.”

However, Yoshida said the biggest reason PS Vita failed to attract a significant audience was Sony did not have the development teams to support it concurrently with its home consoles PS3 and PS4. Vita launched towards the end of the PS3 generation, two years before PS4 arrived.

“I think the biggest reason Vita didn’t do as well as we had hoped was we had to split all our efforts and resources into two different platforms,” Shuhei said. “We didn’t have that resource.

“So for PS3 and PS Vita, and PS4 and PS Vita, studios had to decide which thing to work on, and we didn’t have that big a talent pool to be able to support two different platforms. Of course, console is the biggest platform. We had to support PS3 and PS4, [so] really we had to stop many projects on Vita because we didn’t have teams to make PS4 games.”

Yoshida went on to attribute the huge success of Nintendo’s hybrid console, Switch, on avoiding a similar problem by pooling all of its resources into a single platform. “Nintendo did so well on handheld, but not so well on console… but for Nintendo Switch, all first-party just worked on one hardware. That, I think, really helped Switch.”

Yoshida said he was initially skeptical when he heard about plans for the PlayStation Portal, a streaming-only device launched in 2023, but it surprised him by how well it was received and has sold.

“I was like, who’d want this hardware? Just being remote play. I remember saying to the hardware team, ‘the only way PS Portal will be successful is if we sell it at $199’… and they did it. Not because I said it, because they clearly had the same way of thinking.”

According to reports, PlayStation could be working on a new handheld console capable of playing PS5 games. Commenting on potential future handhelds, Yoshida said he was a big fan of portable PCs in the style of Steam Deck, and that he would be excited if Sony produced such a device.

“That category in which I buy one or two new pieces of hardware is this, so of course, I would be so excited if in the future PlayStation made something like this,” he said. “However, personally, even now PlayStation is much bigger than in the PS3 days, and I don’t think it’s a good idea to try and manage two different platforms.”