Shuhei Yoshida has decided to retire from Sony and gave an interview with Kinda Funny. The topic of why the Vita failed came up and we have to discuss. I have problems with what was said, and it’s a greater issue Sony wants to deny.

For years Sony could never be honest about why the Vita failed. They gave excuses that didnt make sense, like the mobile gaming market was shrinking.  Yoshida’s latest interview still isn’t telling the full truth. He does acknowledge more but doesn’t tell the entire story.

The mobile gaming market at that time was fine. The Nintendo DS competed against it and sold 154 million. The reason the Vita failed was because of Sony. After about two years, they stopped marketing it and almost acted like it didn’t exist. There were no commercials nor E3 presence. Game announcements were usually press releases and PS Blog posts. You really only knew about what games were coming out if you were in the scene.

I agree when Shu says dev resources were split between it and the PS4. But this has always been a thing for Sony. PSP and PS2 existed together and both sold well. Why is it a problem now?

Timing can be implied as a main part of the split resources issue, and at the time resources were getting scarce. Sony was losing a lot of money and they had to prioritize PS4 over Vita, which I understand. Stop lying about why you did stuff.

He does also admit that the proprietary memory cards were a mistake.The cards being proprietary wasn’t the issue, it was greed. The memory cards were a lot more expensive than SD cards.

I agree that the Vita didn’t need the back touch panel. There should have been triggers and vibration. I’d also take a video out feature like on PSP. According to Yoshida, video was going to be a feature but was scrapped.

Another failure from Sony that should be mentioned, is PS TV. They took Vita internals, put in a box, and you could play Vita games on a TV with a controller. It failed because of Sony’s poor planning and execution. Many of the good exclusives on Vita couldn’t be played on it. Some games couldn’t be played on it for no reason. Other games needed to use the camera and Sony didn’t patch the games to work on it. Modders had to allow it to run all the games and patch fixes for games that needed the camera.

There was something else that needed to be corrected. Shu claims that Nintendo became successful when they made Switch and concentrated on one platform. They were successful when they had both Wii and DS. Wii U didn’t pan out because of Nintendo’s own decisions. He then says only one game needs to be developed for Switch, but Sony was developing one game for both console and handheld and adding specific functions for Vita. These weren’t completely different games but we get extra dev time was needed.

PS Vita should have been another successful handheld like PSP. Sony’s decisions are what made it a failure. There were also many times it could have turned it around, but poor planning ruined it. It’s good Shu tells more of the story, but it’s annoying Sony and him can’t be totally honest.