14 DAY TRIAL // Sony has looked back on its PlayStation Portable, admitting that the first wave of marketing efforts for the device didn’t really make it clear to customers what the device was capable of, and promised that, with the upcoming Vita, everything will be focused on its gaming capability.
The original PSP, released back in 2005, didn’t really become the best seller Sony was hoping for, largely because of its rival, the Nintendo DS, and because the Japanese company didn’t really manage to market it in a consistent manner.
This was recently admitted by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe boss Jim Ryan, who told OPM UK that the original plan for the PSP was to make it a multimedia device, but this just ended up confusing people with its array of features.
"I think with PSP we tried to position it as a rather broad multimedia device. We talked a lot in the early days of PSP about its video playback functionality its use as a music device and a host of other multimedia functionality that it had," he explained.
Sony isn’t going to make the same mistake with the Vita, as it will build on the already known feature set of the PSP, while focusing on its gaming capabilities.
"I think this time we've realized that perhaps ended up confusing consumers, and they weren't quite sure what the device was really all about. So this time the Vita does all of that stuff that we talked about on PSP, and it does it a lot better," Ryan continued.
"We've been a lot more single minded and much more focused in our positioning of Vita. We're saying that this is primarily a gaming device. It has been developed from the ground up as a gaming device. What it does best is play games.”
The Sony Europe boss also mentioned that plenty of PSP owners weren’t thrilled to get ported experiences from the PlayStation 2 or PlayStation 3 platforms on their handheld device, so the Vita will have all of its games customized for its features, to ensure that they’re not just lower quality editions of full pledged titles.