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kitler53 on 20 November 2012
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RolStoppable said:
kitler53 said:


well i think sony has gotten better about this.  LBP is amazing, uncharted is really good from what i hear, GG is making killzone, MM is making tearaway so they really do have good talent working on the vita.

 

...and i was thinking on my commute home that i may have been being unfair to call out vita.  it really isn't just vita.  i'm not sure why but western devs and western consumers just have a sigma that handheld games are watered down games.  not exactly sure why that is but i must admit i had that same sigma not too long ago.

The stigma stems from the fact that Western developers are heavily reliant on technology and historically handhelds have been at least one generation behind home consoles in terms of processing power. The actually successful handhelds (which were all made by Nintendo) have even been two generations behind. So Western developers didn't want to bother with handhelds and put crappy and heavily watered down games on the systems. Fans of Western games didn't need long to notice the vastly inferior quality and unless they also played Nintendo games, it was hammered into their minds that handheld games are inferior, period. This has been going on for 15 years before the PSP showed up, so it's hard to reverse such a perception. Especially when most PSP games fueled it instead of proving it wrong, so the PSV is in an even tougher spot today.

While the following is off-topic, it's still relevant to the above paragraph. Many people call Japanese gamers xenophobic, because the Xboxes and Western games aren't particularly popular over there. But what is usually ignored is that Western games were notably inferior to Japanese games for at least two decades. They were nowhere near as polished and, to top it off, usually had also poor translation efforts. It's essentially the same problem as outlined in the above paragraph. If anyone bothers to follow Japan, they will have noticed that games like GTA (published by Capcom) and CoD (published by Square-Enix) actually do gain some traction.

In conclusion, stigmas can be crushed, but it takes a lot of effort, because you need to prove people wrong and you need to do it repeatedly and consistently. The AC and CoD games the Vita has been getting do not help Sony's cause. Even less so, because they decided to bundle these games with the system (bundled software is first impression software).

good points all.  

..but i just want to put out there that it's not the power in vita that broke my own stigma.  the power is nice but really it is the controls, they feel exactly like a standard controller.  on my DS and from what i've played of psp games on vita games always had concessions in controls.  metroid prime hunters and killzone liberation both come to mind -- without the dual analog it just didn't feel good.  they were both "passable" but not fun.  but vita is different in that it's exactly what i'm familiar with.  i like that.  it makes games like LBP, rayman, and super star dusk feel exactly like i want them to, exactly like a console quality experience on the go.  

hopefully, for my own sake, vita sales pick up enough to be at least sustainable.  i really really like my vita.  it would be a shame to have support pulled out but i guess things will play out as they play out.