Check out this interview of Sony Europe President Andrew House on the ins and outs of the PlayStation Vita
Has the general reaction been surprise to the very affordable price points?
I think the reaction I’ve heard from most people has been positively surprised. If you looked online after the January announcement, the speculation was for a higher price. We deliberately set it to be aggressive. You need to build with a portable device very quickly, to move quickly from early adopters and tech enthusiasts into a mass market. Price is one tool that lets you do that.
Are you going to make immediate profit from Vita or is it going to be a situation where you take a bit of a hit at first to build up the user base?
I can’t speak specifically about profitability. The way i would frame it is we’re certainly not in the same territory we were with the first couple of years of PS3. It’s a significantly better business model for the Vita.
How are you going to ensure third parties keep developing for Vita after the launch? How do you keep devs coming back with big IP’s?
I think there’s a couple of ways you can extend longevity around franchises. In contrast with PSP, where it was essentially taking a home console experience and converting it onto a portable device, we’ve worked hard on Vita to pack in as many new interfaces as we can that are only possible on a portable device. And that does two things. It differentiates gaming on that device from other devices, giving developers a road map to explore in terms getting the best out of their franchises. The other thing is, because we’ve got a connected device, especially with 3G, it opens up a lot of opportunity for delivering episodes of teh franchise in different ways (i.e cross-play between portable and home experiences). All of these things bode well for extending the franchise life cycle.
Ruin showed data transfer between Vita and PS3. Is using cloud based saves, in light of the PSN outage, somthing you’ve had to think about?
It’s given us a pause for thought. Having said that, like cross game voice chat, it’s one of the things we heard gamers were really interested in and wanted. So I think we have to strike a balance between pursuing what our audience wants and addressing any risks associated with that in the context of the wider security measures we’re putting in place.
You can use PSVita as a PS3 contoller, putting Sony in the same sort of space as the Wii U. So you see a battle bewteen the two?
It’s difficult for me to address the Wii U proposition, because I’m not entirely sure what the intention is there. From a Playstation perspective, when we first launched PSP, we talked a lot about shared content between devices. But for whatever reasons that never really cam to fulfilment. So it’s really encouraging now that we’re fulfilling that promise with Vita and being able to demonstrate those promises tangibly this early, i.e prior to launch, especially with Ruin, which i thought was a really exciting concept. I think that bodes really well for teh device and really well as a thought starter to get the developer community thinking about opportunities there. Publishers I’ve spoken to are very excited about this opportunity. People are increasingly thinking about how they can keep a consumer engaged with a franchise and are thinking holistically about how a franchise operates around different devices. They’re also thinking about different ways to deliver that content, whether it’s DLC or in packaged media form. I think Vita gives publishers another way to make that more powerful.
Source: Official PlayStation Magazine
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PSP2 / Playstation Vita InsiderPSP2 / Playstation Vita Insider
Gamelife is reporting that All PlayStation Vita games will be available in digital form, Sony said Tuesday, reconfirming a statement the company made earlier this year.
