PlayStation Vita Bumped to Early 2012 in US, Europe
by Andrew Cunningham on August 4, 2011 5:04 PM EST- Posted in
- Gaming
- Sony
- PlayStation
If you were hoping to pick up a PlayStation Vita this holiday season, you'd better live in Japan: Sony's Kaz Hirai dropped the bad news in a Japanese press conference that the United States and European markets would see the Vita in 2012 rather than 2011 as previously indicated, though the system still appears to be on track for a 2011 launch in Japan. Hirai indicated that there were no planned price cuts for the PS Vita, in spite of Nintendo's plans to cut the price of the 3DS later this month.
The Vita, with its quad-core Samsung-manufactured SoC, 5" OLED screen, rear touchpad, dual joysticks and optional 3G connectivity, certainly looks appealing on paper, and if the portable gaming market still looked the way it did in 2006 the company would no doubt have a winner on its hands; however, it remains to be seen how it and its more expensive, bigger-budget games compete in the 99-cents-a-game market that smartphones and tablets have created.
If Sony can provide gamers with a well-stocked, easy-to-use, competitively priced app store on the Vita, it may just be able to get around some of the problems that the 3DS has been having - Penny Arcade's Tycho humorously compared that system's online store to "the nightmare an actual online store would have" earlier this week.
Source: Bloomberg
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Black Patriot - Thursday, August 4, 2011 - link
Doesn't the Vita have an OLED screen, not an LCD one?Shame it's been delayed, but I doubt that'll slow it down when it does get released.
Hrel - Thursday, August 4, 2011 - link
The more this thing gets delayed the less impressive the hardware is. They either need to have it run Android and/or Sony's on OS. Or they need to drop the price 50 bucks. I think Officially supporting the free Android OS would be the better route. Still, this is dissapointing. That delay puts it into a completely different category on my wish list. Also turns me back towards Archos for my next handheld. Not the same gaming capabilities. But like the article said, who wants to pay 50 bucks for a mobile game anymore? 10 maybe, but that's it.vision33r - Thursday, August 4, 2011 - link
A dedicated console does not need to jump on the Android bandwagon. Android is less impressive when you look at the tech it uses for gaming.Sony would have to write their own API for graphics, input/output, and it is just for gaming not for surfing the web.
And the last thing Sony wants is somebody root the device and kill it with piracy again.
Quinton McLeod - Thursday, August 4, 2011 - link
Why do people keep comparing the 99 cent app games to the other portable (and console) gaming markets? They are two complete separate markets. I never heard these arguments used before when Pogo games or Facebook games were (and still are) popular.Understand that the video game market still gross more a year than the 99 cent app gaming market. Not only that, it's much more predictable. With apps sold on a smart phone, the market hasn't even matured yet. No one knows if this will change in the next few years or not.
Stop comparing phones to gaming consoles/portables. They are different!
Andrew.a.cunningham - Friday, August 5, 2011 - link
They are different markets, and the gaming experiences available on dedicated consoles are very different (and, mostly, much more substantial) than those available on phones/tablets, but they're competing for the same audience and the same time.The main problem for dedicated consoles is the convenience of do-everything devices like the iPod touch - even if the games aren't as good, the space I save in my pocket (and my wallet) is worth something, and I think we'll see that balance continue to shift.
Quinton McLeod - Friday, August 5, 2011 - link
That doesn't make any sense. Ya know, Cable television, Netflix and paper-back novels also compete for the same audience and the same time. That doesn't mean that they are all the same.If 230 million copies of "Motorcyle Stories" the novel sells, it doesn't mean that it will have a large impact on video game sales. Video game sales and book sales can co-exist because they're different markets.
And your "do-everything" hypothesis is incorrect. There are several items that do everything, but aren't market leaders. For example: The PS3. Although it can do several things, it doesn't compare with the Wii in terms of annual sales. Also, the Ngage was a phone that could play games and it failed a similar fate.
Understand that we are talking about two separate markets and you simply can't compare the two. One device is a phone and the other is a dedicated gaming device. They are different, and comparing to two together would be a large mistake.
IlllI - Friday, August 5, 2011 - link
if this thing will have backward compatibility with the psp? if not, seems like a bad movetipoo - Friday, August 5, 2011 - link
It will. You won't be able to use your old UMD's though, you'd have to download the game.WhamBham - Sunday, August 7, 2011 - link
And we all know how that turned out for PSP Go users right? There's no way you can make that kind of statement since Sony hasn't officially confirmed it.And even a confirmation is bull because they confirmed the program for the PSP Go before they killed it. It turned out to be little more than their attempt at "exploring" the issue until there were "legal" reasons as to why they couldn't implement it, sorry.
In short, no way you can make that claim until PSP Vita is on the shelves and the actual UMD transfer or rebate program is live. Anything else is conjecture or Sony "exploring" their options.
This thing is beginning to look more like a joke as time passes. 3DS already has a head start and a price drop and the ability to play the entire back catalog of DS games as well as both the touch and 3D gimmicks that attemps to bring something new to the table while this thing is still expensive, delayed, no gimmicks and it has a lame GNC name. Yawn.