PlayStation out of the conversation on portables

With the Vita PSN store shutting up shop, Sony should be pleased to be shot of the whole portable deal. Having given up on the PSP too early and its successor in embarrassing fashion, it ceded the whole portable gaming market to Nintendo, but safe in the knowledge that the PS5 would be a huge hit. 

And it has. But supplies are still short, pushing the day it becomes profitable ever further back. And those big-name games for PS5 are taking longer to develop, with Ghostwire being the latest delay. Sony might make many millions from those big hitters, but the delays eat into profits, send more people to Xbox or Nintendo land, and create a "high-end, few-games" mythos, especially with Xbox snapping up big-name, third-party, devs at a rapid pace.  

It may be short-term damage for long-term gain, but while Sony has declared portables dead, the rest of the world didn't get the memo. The last few weeks have seen massive interest in Nintendo's OLED Switch (without the company feeling the need for a CPU/GPU power boost) and now Steam dropping a portable brick with the Deck to make PC gaming more accessible (but I wonder how many limiting *s will appear on the back of the box when it comes to battery life).

The power of portable isn't about the power 

All of a sudden every gaming website is talking portables again. That has boosted the Vita's last-legs profile to its highest point in years across social media. People are picking them up again to dive into a decade of gaming and the farewell party next week should be very well attended. 

But at Sony HQ, what's the message? Look at our console you can't buy, our games that you can't play (here's another teaser) and ignore all those other formats? That's sketchy at best. And while Sony was struggling financially and had to make hard choices when it canned the Vita, the damage and impact of not having a lightweight format is spreading. 

Sony has nothing that attracts fans who can't get a PS5, it can't compete with Nintendo or keep indie devs (who flocked the Vita in the early days and kept it alive to the end) interested. This might not have a massive financial and marketing impact on Sony today, but that impact is growing fast. PSP and Vita kept gamers interested between Sony's main console eras, and now the PlayStation brand looks really bereft of content. 

*Rose-tinted glasses on* All it would have taken is a modest 2017 mid-life upgrade to keep both larger and indie developers interested, especially in Japan. And, around now, a Vita2 or PS5RemotePlayer, and Sony would still be in the game, competing, and possibly winning. Sony perfected the handheld design with the Vita slim, nothing has come close since, a shame so few got to try one (it makes my Switch feel so badly designed in comparison - yes I might get a Switch OLED, but feel no pressing love or need to grab one). 

Instead, Sony moaned constantly about the threat of mobile gaming up to 2015 and wimped out. By investing and keeping some faith, it could have kept developers like Japan Studio going to create unique content that doesn't involve zombies or massive open worlds. Nintendo seems to have survived the mobile gaming scourge, Evercade has thrived over the last year, and there are devices for every budget.  

Sony losing pace despite PS5's "success"

Some effort by Sony would have kept physical card factory production running, keeping third-party developers happy. And while newer devices might not have sold massive numbers, 15-20 million is nothing to sniff at, and it would put Sony in a better position than going...

"But PS5, someday, maybe, with some massive games, someday, maybe*!"

Instead, Sony looks a company that made some very bad choices, quitting and retreating into this strange niche of powerful hardware that's mostly good for upgraded old games. I like my PS5 (for an improved Cyberpunk and No Man's Sky experience compared to PS4) and while the new exclusive games are stunning to look at, gaming is fast-topping out in terms of visual flair. And the much vaunted massively AI worlds are still thick as cow-dung. 

The cry for #weekendgames is growing and while plenty of indies are happy to be on PS5, the marketing scam (sorry, industry practice) of pay-for-store-presence cuts many of them out. The Vita's slower release cadence did much to promote smaller developers and would still be valuable for nurturing talent. 

Also, in Japan, PS5 sales are terrible, just over 900K sold according to Famitsu data, with a lack of big games with a local identity. If the Vita had carried on with Sony support, who knows what series could be backing up the big new console to challenge Switch domination (16/20 games in the latest Famitsu chart are Switch titles, the other 4 are for PS4)? By giving up on the Vita, Sony gave up on its home country, and likely knew what's what would happen. 

Reduced load-times don't exactly make up for that, and I prefer playing my indies and backlog on the PS4 to preserve that oh-so-precious PS5 storage space, and for Remote Play. All of which reduces the value of the PS5 further. Yep, a Vita2 would have been so much cooler and Sony could benefit so much more than being tied to the slow PS5-production-mill. 

And then there's the M.2 upgrade minor-level farce that could further damage the PS5's reputation among general consumers. A silly styling choice over customer ease-of-use shows a company getting way out of sync with its users. 

*STC, conditions apply, estimates vary, not available in Minnesota. 

The sad news is, this bubble of news will soon quiet down, Sony will go back to looking at its little bubble of big-number spreadsheet predictions and the world will move on, because Sony has lost any bravery it ever had and is committed to its one-way street. 

And, yeah, we have the power of hindsight etc. But Sony has been watching 5 years of Switch success and its own tunnel vision to see where things were going, and had the time and money to change.