Shahid Ahmad: “More Developers Make More Money on Average on Vita Than They do on Mobile”

August 21, 2013 Written by Jason Dunning

Just by looking at all the new games announced this week at gamescom, it’s clear that Sony wants indie games on the PlayStation Vita, and indie developers want their games on PlayStation Vita.

In an article by Polygon, Shahid Ahmad, Ruler of Twitter, revealed something very interesting about the PlayStation Vita and how lucrative putting a game on it can be:

More developers make more money on average on Vita than they do on mobile. When people buy a Vita, they want to purchase games. I tell developers, if you’re trying to build a business, then building your game and bringing it to Vita is a great investment.

If you want to play the lottery, then putting a game on iOS is more like that. You’re scratching that and hoping you get discovered, hoping that a lot of people talk about you. Whereas Vita, every week when there’s content coming out, people buzz about it and it spreads like wildfire, because everyone’s firing that console up every day to look at the content and talk about it.

Backing up Shahid’s claim is Phil Gaskell, Co-Founder of Ripstone, who said that Pure Chess has sold more on PS Vita than PS3, while Men’s Room Mayhem “sold more units on PS Vita in its first month than on iOS and Android combined.”

Adam Boyes, VP of Publisher Relations at SCEA, chimed in on the PlayStation Vita and its Remote Play functionality with the PS4, saying, “We’ve said internally that it’s going to be the greatest peripheral ever made for a console.” While on the topic of establishing an Indie section on the PlayStation Store, he talked up how well it’s been performing:

We’re working to drive as much traffic to the indie store as possible. We’ve seen an impressive improvement on sales and discoverability. Once people discover one game and find out that this is the genre that it’s in, it’s easy for them to discover other similar types of content that they start to fall in love with.

Are you surprised that developers can make more money on average on PlayStation Vita when compared to mobile? Let us know in the comments below.

http://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2013/08/21/shahid-ahmad-more-developers-make-more-money-on-average-on-vita-than-they-do-on-mobile/

I bought Pure Chess on the Vita.

I'm not surprised. Sony actively tries to advertise most of these games. Look at all the work they did for DiveKick, for example. It was all over the place.

Mobile is mostly a story of a few huge successes bounded by tons of people who made next to nothing.

Well this is true atm since there isnt much else to play, if the games ever start flowing then the indies will get less love.

I'd really have to see more data to really believe this. Sony has been known to errrr spin things sometimes. I wouldn't be too surprised if it were true though. The Vita marketplace is a lot less cluttered, and even if there are only about 5 million Vita owners, those are 5 million people willing to pay for games.

Yeah there are so many trash smartphone developers bringing down the average. Sony only allows functioning games on Vita so of course they make more money, on average.

Its really not difficult to understand. The Vita is a system you WANT to play in. Heck if i could stream my 3DS games on the Vita i would totally do that. Its just a pretty and confortable system you want to use. I am not surprised that all users buy whatever small games just so they have an excuse to do it. I personally have bought several PSP games with that purpose in mind. The best part of the Vita is that the software is very affordable. Much more so than the 3DS.

Maybe on average but the highs on ios is tenfold times higher than a high on vita and the same goes for the 3DS so everyone is trying on it to win the lottery so to speak

Yes, this is actually good news not only for PSV, but also for portable consoles in general, about profitability for early 3rd party support on them. BTW, smartphones and tablet markets were never meant to be pure gaming ones, they are more like PC market, with a strong gaming minority, so this case study could help clearing possible misunderstandings about two markets that aren't the same: for many reasons, that include the purposes of the respective devices and the controls they offer, the games for each market can't be the same except in a minority of cases, not to mention that the percentage of users willing to pay for them are so radically different that business models must be as much different too, up to affecting gameplay, as we can clearly see in mobile F2P games with premium items, and sometimes these latter policies, in the effort to push users to pay real money, end up screwing them to the point of making them hate mobile games that they previosly loved (it happened to me too, with EA's Real Racing 3).