Hello Everyone,

Yesterday morning we learned something interesting : Tales of Hearts F will be released for Playsation Vita in Spring 2013 in Japan. While I'm really happy to have the occasion of enjoy my Vita even further, I can't help thinking it's strange.

Tales of the Abyss 3D sold more than Innoncence R in Japan and Namco was satisfied with its sales in the West. Innocence R didn't make it to our shores and Tales of Heart F is not likely to. 3DS sees stellar sales in Japan whereas PSVita has been doing sub-par performance for months. Why did the publisher choose Vita over 3DS? Did Nintendo increase the royalties? Might Namco prefer the PSNework over the Nintendo Network for the digital sales? What do you think?

Because only Nintendo games sell on Nintendo platforms.

I have no possible explanation for this. I would like to be enlighted by the more knowledgeable people here.

Or maybe it's just a deal they signed and that's it ┐(￣ー￣)┌.

You can't really compare tales of the abyss with tales of innocence.

One game is among the most popular tales of.

The other (as for the all serie on ds) is one of the less popular mothership tales of.

Well it is easier to make a vita game than even an iOS game so if they don't expect the game to sell super in the first place of course Vita is the most logical.

I think 90k to 1million compared to 140k to 7.7million is a greater ratio. Plus there's also the matter of hardware restrictions, or they might have found making an enhanced port of Innocence R was easier to achieve on the Vita or better resembled what they wanted a complete version of Hearts F to represent. Who knows. Could just be bags of money. I doubt it though.

Also I'd ascribe Abyss' success in the west to the fact so few JRPGs exist on the handheld. It's kind of like how Cross Edge sold well enough in NA on the PS3 despite it being such a god awful game.

I think it's in the interest of publishers to expand the market as much as they can. People keep implying that developers are going to abandon the Vita, but I can't see that happening. It's bad business long-term. Rather, what we've seen is that developers are clinging on to the PSP longer than they should. The big publishers, and the developers Sony works with closely, are going to have to be the ones to move the market forward. It just makes good business sense, though it might hurt short-term earnings.

In other words, if everyone is only releasing games for one handheld, then it's going to be an extremely crowded market, especially when you're talking about a Nintendo system with Nintendo developed games steam-rolling just about everything else. The smart publishers know that everyone is better off with a second viable platform available.

I've said it before, but I think the Vita is going to be fine once developers finish up their PSP projects. It's just not going to be soon enough for the doom-callers on forums and gaming websites. I think the end of next year and the beginning of the year after are going to see a healthy crop of Japanese Vita reveals and releases.

I wasn't speaking directly to this, but in a general sense, as people are going to be asking the same question with every game that releases for the Vita.  If you don't think publishers would prefer competition between consoles then that's your opinion.  I've stated mine.

By the time we get a tales game Japan will already have 3 more :P

Maybe it's just taking one for the team so Vita will actually have some more games available. Someone had to do it.