Wired
After getting everyone’s hopes up, Sony now says only one user account can be used on a PlayStation Vita.
Though a Sony representative told Wired.com at a Vita preview event last week in Manhattan that Vita users will be able to switch accounts by swapping out memory cards, the PlayStation maker has now retracted that statement. It told Wired.com in an email on Thursday that Vita owners will indeed have to reset their hardware to factory settings, deleting all of their data, in order to sign in with a different PlayStation Network account.
Sony will release Vita in Japan on Saturday and in the U.S. on February 22.
“[The] PSN account is tied to the hardware and the memory card, not just the card,” a different Sony representative said in an e-mail, “which means that if a second person is using your Vita, it’s not just a case of switching out memory cards, it’s clearing out all of your saved data on the Vita itself when you do the factory reset.”
“In other words, PlayStation Vita is intended to be played by only one user,” the representative said.
Vita users will have to delete all of their data in order to use new accounts on Sony’s online network, which is used for both digital shopping and multiplayer gaming. The PlayStation 3 and PSP allow users to sign in with separate accounts. They also allow players in different regions to create Japanese or European accounts to download games from those regions. It seems that neither of these things will be possible on PlayStation Vita — at least not without jumping through some as-yet-undiscovered loopholes.
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2011/12/sony-vita-psn/
