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trent44 on 05 July 2011
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HappySqurriel said:
trent44 said:
I guess Kotick has become even more short sighted.

Developers make an average of $4,000 revenue for a smart phone game; that market is already over saturated and will only become more so. And, there is already talk of the smart phone market bubble burst that will occur from this.

The PS Vita is taking a blue ocean strategy and expanding on the market niche the PSP has started. The market is targeting all existing PSP owners and traditional gamers that have never owned a portable console. And, anyone who wants a device that is 1/3 the size, 1/2 the price, and 2 times as powerful as an iPad 2 without having to sift through thousands of junk apps to find actual quality games. The Vita also offers new unique ways to play portable games and has robust social features built into the device.

Overall, the Vita is offered at a lower price, with higher quality content, and is actually a differentiated product compared to smart phone #345 or tablet #56.

Saying a gaming device like the Vita can't be successful because people have phones is like saying home consoles can't be successful because people have PCs.


From many publishers' perspective, the Playstation Vita is a massive risk due to the extremely large budgets required to take advantage of the graphical capabilities. Even with the XBox 360, PS3 and PC to release HD games on, and selling these games for $20 to $30 more than most handheld games sell for, publishers have struggled to break even on a large portion of the games they released on the HD consoles over the past 6 years. If you're producing original PS Vita games that push its limits the budgets will grow to the range of these HD console games, and you're almost ensured to lose money if you release this game exclusively.

What this means is that publishers will likely focus on porting HD console games to the PS Vita and these will probably make it to market 12 to 24 months after their console equilivalent was released, or producing games that don't come close to taking advantage of the PS Vita's capabilities and could (probably) run on the 3DS or any smartphone. Old ports are not (necessarily) a bad thing, but the age of the ports the PS Vita will be getting is (probably) the age that minimizes sales; much older games (5+ year old games) have value because they're seen as classics, and new games have value because no one has played them before, but if a game is a couple years old few people who really wanted to play it wouldn't have played it and few people would be looking to play through it again.

Please note, I'm not trying to bash the Vita but I think it is positioned in an odd place where publishers are probably wondering what to do with it.

Sony has said that the Vita development budgets are closer to PSP levels than PS3 levels. This is probably due to the 0.522 Megapixel resolution of the OLED screen (HD is 2.07 MP), streamlined development kits (which has already received praise from many developers for how easy it is), and lower poly count used in Vita games.

Vita's distribution models support a range of development budgets (price points $1-$40) with having both digital and physical copies of Vita games and supporting compatibility with PSP minis, Downloadable PSP games, and PlayStation Suite games.

This actually draws to another point that even though phones are going to be more powerful in the future, they still have constraints on price points their market is willing to pay for a game, which is too low to support development budgets to sustain taking advantage of future hardware.

Additionally, there is a great limitation to depth of game experiences that can be had on devices featuring only a touch screen and gyroscope; giving developers more flexibility of control options in the Vita allows for more creative and new game experiences to be made.

The Vita is well positioned because it is a high quality, low priced, differentiated product which developers are excited to make games for; in fact, over 150 studios are currently making games for the Vita.