14 DAY TRIAL // Sony has shared some more details about the creation of the PlayStation Vita, its all-new handheld console, highlighting that the company’s internal game studios helped its hardware development team with vital feedback in order to make the mobile device easy to develop games for.
The PlayStation Vita is, at least according to Sony itself, the best mobile gaming console out there, not just because of its powerful hardware but also because of the variety of games that are already confirmed to be released for it, starting with February, 2012.
This big number of games is largely due to the fact that Sony had its hardware and software development branches work together to make sure that the PlayStation Vita would be a system that didn’t pose any serious problems to game developers, unlike the PS3, which became infamous, at least in its early years, for its awkward hardware configuration.
The development process of the Vita was detailed by Sony Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida, who coordinated the work between his own internal groups and the hardware team.
“When Kaz Hirai took over management of SCEI,” Yoshida said, “he brought in the approach of fully integrating software and hardware development. Before that, we made brilliant hardware, no question of that, but our hardware team didn’t have such a good understanding of what game developers need or what features might be useful.”
Alongside each development stage, studios would provide feedback and even demonstrations concerning any major hardware decisions, according to Yoshida.
“[With PS Vita] we [Worldwide Studios] were there right at the beginning to express our thoughts and reactions to the hardware that was being proposed. We were there at every stage and with every prototype, and we developed game builds to prove and, sometimes, disprove how each new feature was going to make for a great game system.”
The PlayStation Vita is already on sale in Japan and is getting ready to appear in Europe and North America in February, 2012.