‘Perfect storm’ hindered Japanese PS Vita launch

PlayStation Vita launched in Japan during a “perfect storm” which did the handheld no favours whatsoever, Shuhei Yoshida , president of worldwide studios for Sony Computer Entertainment, has told GamesBeat.

“The Japanese launch, you saw the sell-through numbers, you notice that we haven’t been able to sell out the units that we sold in,” said Yoshida. “Of course, that would have been great if we sold something like that, but it didn’t happen. The sales numbers are within the range that we’ve been expecting, but they didn’t hit the highest, the kind that would have made us ecstatic.”

He added: “Looking very objectively at the market situation there in Japan, especially on the portable, PSP is still very popular. You can see, when you see the new software calendars, every month publishers are launching good product, new products on PSP. And also, they’re still announcing new products coming later this year. PSP is still very alive, still a viable business platform for third-party publishers.

“Of course, Nintendo dropped a surprise last year. They had a good line-up of software as we prepared for the PS Vita launch. So we had the perfect storm of 3DS going into Christmas, PSP still very popular, and publishers have to really think about how they’re going to allocate resources to three portable platforms, in addition to all the other things going on in the social and mobile spaces.”

However, Yoshida believes Vita’s launch can be more successful in the West, where the handheld’s software line-up will be better received.

“What’s potentially working for us for PS Vita in the United States, it’s basically two things,” explained Yoshida. “One, the kind of games that work really well on PS Vita, the double analogue sticks, great graphics on the screen, are the kind of games that people love here. Action-adventures, shooters, FPS. We are betting that games like Uncharted or sports games like FIFA, Madden, Call of Duty, these are games that will lead people to look at the features of portable gaming on PS Vita, to have a great experience even compared to console games.

“The other thing is, the line-up that we have been preparing. Uncharted, it’s a great title, one of the big franchises, but it doesn’t really work in Japan. SCE Japan marketing is making an effort, so the awareness is going up, but still, Uncharted 3 sold about 200,000 units. It’s very small sales compared to. Call of Duty did like 300,000 or 400,000? And that’s the biggest-selling game made outside Japan. That’s a hard market, when you see something like Monster Hunter selling like four million units, just in Japan. So we were very proud of the fact that we had more than 20 games at the launch of PS Vita in Japan, but when you look at each title, not many of them really catered toward the Japanese market. Not something where Japanese gamers would say, ‘I have to have that.'”

PS Vita launches in the UK on February 22 and can be yours for as little as £210 with a free 8GB memory card.