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PlayStation Boss Defends Vita, Slams Social Gaming
donniebaseball23 writes "Sony Computer Entertainment America boss Jack Tretton has come out swinging to defend the lackluster response the games industry has seen with the PS Vita. He deemed the sales level for the portable as 'acceptable' so far, and he brushed off any notion that social and free-to-play games are putting huge pressure on the portable and dedicated consoles market. 'I think the opportunity to be in the console business is greater than ever before,' he said. '[Social and free-to-play] is a business I think a lot of companies are learning is difficult to sustain for the long term. It's an adjunct or it's an add-on, but it's not where gaming is headed. It's an additive diversion. There's a place for social and freemium, but it's not going to replace the business models that are out there.'"
The company is having a hard time getting third-party developers interested in the Vita platform.
...managed to convince themselves that giving their customer choices will be bad for business.
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
3 months from being done, Sony cancelled the game we were developing that would run on PS3 and Vita. Guess the lack of titles on the Vita isn't a problem for them.
He must be a Gnome 3 developer too
the Vita platforms has a ton of really cool potential.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Executive in entrenched industry doesn't like new disruptive technology driving industry shift!
The thing is, he could even be right that social/casual/freemium gaming is not sustainable and not going to supplant his business model. But it's hardly news that he thinks so.
...it's that everyone already has an iPhone or Android in their pocket and doesn't want a whole separate device for gaming.
... made the playstation phone like every one wanted
Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, etal... They shouldn't be scared, they should all be very, VERY Frightened! Coming in March 2013, OUYA's gonna get 'em! http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/372183/20120809/ouya-kickstarter-pre-order-release-date-specs.htm
Gaming was never the draw for most people using portable devices; occupying time was the draw. People can do that with more stuff now, so of course the value of a strictly-gaming device is going to fall.
...everything else starts to look like a foreign plug.
The company is having a hard time getting third-party developers interested in the Vita platform.
Aww, poor Sony. Why on Earth would developers not like them?
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
The vita is not doing well because the Vita sucks, and for no other reason.
Seriously, no cartridge based games? This was one reason, among many, of why the PSP failed too.
I have a Vita, it's a nice piece of kit, lack of games is a bit of a concern, I've had mine for months yet only 3 games so far. It doesn't help that when on the tube (London Underground) you're lucky to be in a position where you have both hands free. I prefer reading on my kindle, least you're certain to have one hand free during rush hour!
Now portable wise it's the 1Ghz Pandora that I should be receiving next week. Generally it seems qemu is able to emulate roughly a 75Mhz Pentium on there. Just hope that Master of Orion 2 is playable on the move. Oh and I'm not trying to sell one to you (I'm not affiliated in anyway), you should really check it out;
http://www.openpandora.org/index.php
Last year everybody was like, "teh nintendoz 3ds iz teh doomz. vita will pown 3ds". Now the 3DS is doing fairly well and the Vita isn't.
Isn't that exactly what "real games" are too? Or did something fundamentally change when the hobby graduated into an industry?
But wait, wasn't the lackluster of sales and poor availability of games for the PSP the result of 'piracy' according to Jack? What's the excuse this time? The sales are merely 'acceptable'? And they're just having 'a hard time' getting developers to program for it? I think they're barking up the wrong tree here.
Well I got just three words for him: World of Tanks.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
I can't buy a vita because looking at one makes me sad. .. And fatally crippled by it's software. Sony so completely, amazingly out of touch with what the consumer wants that it can not make a functioning game ecosystem. They've taken their previous. "You'll take our shit and /like/ it" development model to the extreme and wonder why developers are giving it a pass.
Amazing hardware with great controls. Fast quad core CPU, OLED screen, everything you want.
I know most of you reading this have a bias and predisposition that makes you unable to understand that iOS and andriod devices are now competing for the same dollars that traditional handheld game systems once had tied up.. But they do. Ask any young kid what they want between an ipad, iphone, andriod phone, andriod tab, vita, and 3ds. If you're over ~23 years old be prepared to be shocked. Kids want ipads. Not the machines you used to play pokemon growing up.
Portable gaming without traditional d-pad and button controls is here. Understand it, or be shoved aside. .. Imagine if nintendo sold an official iphone game controller shell and sold pokemon games on the app store. Yeah, they'd make a killing. You know it. I know it. Why don't they do it? Pride. Plain old stubborn Japanese pride will be the death of Nintendo and Sony in the portable arena. It's 2012 and they're products have not budged one nanometer from their previous iterations.
Sony's having a hard time getting *gamers* interested in the Vita. It's an amazingly powerful handheld, but it's trying to offer $60, 40-hour console-level games in a portable.
It's competing not just with Nintendo's handheld, but with the iPhone and Android, and even to an extent Facebook games. Which are shorter and less involved, yes, but also cheaper, possibly even "free" (or at least, free-to-play, pay-to-win).
Problem is, portable gaming has shifted. It's not something you sit in front of for hours and play, it's something you play for a few minutes on your coffee break. Nintendo at least tries to make games that you *can* play for just a few minutes. They're not perfect at it (as evidenced by their own sales problems), but they're at least aware of the problem. Sony seems to be betting the house on people wanting full-sized games on a handheld, and that's just not really true anymore (to an extent, I doubt it ever really was). In the time it takes to *load* some Vita games, I can have finished a round of Angry Birds or Edge or whatever.
The other problem is that there's just no must-have games for it yet. For either handheld, really. They have a few good games apiece, but nothing that will sell not just the game, but the console. Third-parties rarely make those games - it's usually first-parties - but it doesn't help to not have them.
Sony, your users are not the enemy! I promise you that many other companies do just fine in life by embracing their users as customers instead of enemies. You can even make money off of them. Drop the hostile attitude and remember your roots. People aren't buying your products because they are perceived as bad for customers to own.
It's not about technology or usability. Why is this so hard to understand? How many billions of dollars do you have to lose before you /get/ this?
It's almost as if they learned nothing from Apple's "we know what you want better than you do" strategy.
Curent portables have made huge advances in technology, but the form factor doesn't support these capabilities. When I am using a mobile device, I am not looking for a deeply immersive gaming experience. Even if I did want that, a 4 inch screen isn't going to cut it, regardless of the resolution. Just because hardware makers can port much of the graphic and input technologies into a mobile device, doesn't mean that they should.
For portable gaming, it is clear that people are satisfied with relatively simplistic gameplay and graphics. A "retro" arcade type game is much better suited to the capabilities of a mobile device and the amount of attention being mobile allows.
I'm pretty sure he's right that "Free to Play" is not the future of gaming. There's no indication so far that any game that costs nothing to play, but is monetized by the in-game purchases made by players will ever reach the kind of quality of experience of the best single-player games.
Maybe it's just my age. Maybe it's just that I actually remember really top-notch games that would engage you for 100 hours or more, where you came away thinking, "Man, if they make another one like this, I'll buy it day one and not even hesitate to pay full price". The Half-Life series comes to mind. Starcraft, Burnout Paradise (pick your platform) and others. Maybe there are Free to Play games that are as good and I just haven't heard of them.
I suppose that eventually, as new games continue to disappoint, that customers will forget what a good game is like and be happy with whatever the industry feeds them. It's happened in other areas. When enough really crappy $60 games are released back to back, maybe Diablo 3 will seem like manna from heaven. Enough shitty ports of 3rd person console games and you think Mass Effect 3 or Max Payne 3 is worth the price.
I wonder if the gaming industry gets mad at the developers of Arkham City or companies like Volition for setting a bar that they were hoping would have come way down to the point where crappy free to play "social gaming" is considered the pinnacle of gaming.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I loved the hardware when I had a Vita. I traded the thing back in because spending a cumulative 4 hours on the phone with Sony and another 2 hours on the phone with my bank led to no progress in Sony being able to actually charge my credit card for a game over PSN. Sony's customer service was completely useless and excessively rude the entire time; I haven't used a Sony product since unless you count the Blu-Ray format, which is difficult to avoid.
I have a vita. I like it a lot. It's a very solid piece of hardware, lots of interesting features.
However, it'll have to be a decent bit cheaper and have a lot more interesting games to bring in too many outside of the core fan gamer crowd and jrpg fans. As is, it has few interesting games that aren't just portable versions of existing franchises. It has gravity rush, which is a great game, but it'll need something with a bit more exposure to pull people in.
So developers are wary of making games for a console that doesn't have too many owners, that's not too surprising.
What the heck is a Playstation Vita?? /lolatyourunknownproduct
He's saying that people SHOULD have choices..... both free on the phone and professional-level games on portables like Nintendo DS and PSP/Vita.
But only "portables like Nintendo DS and PSP/Vita" are suitable for genres that rely on physical buttons. As I understand it, virtually no one already owns an iCade controller, an iControlPad controller, or an Xperia Play phone.
. . . but I can still buy full-featured mobile games for 1/10th - 1/60th the price of what Tretton is selling. Tretton has more in common with the nickle-and-dimers than he may want to acknowledge. The difference is, he wants gamers to pay through the nose up front, rather than stringing them along (and giving them the option to wise up before spending too much).
They should have just made an android-based phone with a really slick controller case.
I thought Sony did just that: Xperia Play.
Anybody who has an iPhone, or an Android phone other than an Xperia Play, will need a separate $62 device anyway.
See my reply to poly_pusher.
I've yet to see a single game for it that isn't a clone of something else
I've yet to see a game for any system in the past fifteen years that isn't a clone. There hasn't been a new genre launch (that I'm aware of) since Parappa the Rapper launched rhythm games. Even Katamari Damacy, which a lot of people have hauled out as an example of a highly original game, was just a 3D platformer with the growing mechanic from the early 1980s arcade game Bubbles. Of course I'm probably wrong; please correct me if so.
Or do I misunderstand your definition of clone?
I owned a Vita for about 16 hours before returning it. It's a poorly designed handheld gaming console that takes propitiatory memory. Both my hands and my wallet were cramped after trying the Vita and I got very little satisfaction from the experience. I wonder why they aren't selling all that well.
What changed was the lockout chip, which was Atari's and Nintendo's response to a glut of Atari 2600 titles in 1983 that was threatening toy retailers' perceptions of video games in general. Only developers hand-picked by the console makers may make and publish games for the consoles, and the console makers' policies tend to require "relevant video game industry experience" on some other platform, which is ultimately more suited to poaching developers from other platforms than to launching careers. The mobile phone app stores brought back opportunities for smaller games from smaller developers with smaller budgets to fit smaller play sessions.
The SDK is based off of C#, and smartphone developers have said porting existing iOS and Android apps over is very easy.
I thought C# would make porting Windows Phone apps and Xbox 360 XNA games easier. To translate an iOS or Android game would require a line-by-line rewrite of the game logic, which violates the "Don't Repeat Yourself" principle, introduces bugs, and doesn't allow changes to the C++ version to propagate to the C# version or vice versa.
I agree with his comments on social gaming and, for the most part, don't think he goes far enough. I don't believe games like Farmville and Infinity Blade are going to replace anything in gaming proper. That said, as an avid gamer I have less than zero interest in the Vita - no one's doing portable gaming well these days, the last good portable system I enjoyed was the original Gameboy and a copy of Tetris. Maybe in a few years, with a different manufacturer.
Cause its expensive and shares the same heritage as the PSP, which means we will get 4 hardware revisions and a pile of expensive shovelware shit games. I dont know about others, but I sure as shit am not wasting my time or money on a sony portable ever again.
VIta..mins? Who needs a costly portable console and expensive games when any Android tablet have a pletora of new games and emulators?
I understand – I'm informed that Alexander Peter Kowalski once trained under your auspices.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
I can pretty much say everyone I know in that category plays a small fraction of the amount they used to.
Yepp. I recently (a few months ago) sold out the last big boxes of my quite impressive 20-year-old Pen & Paper RPG collection. I picked up Tango dancing 5 years ago, met a few ladies along the way and met my girlfriend a year ago at a small Tango event. Upping your skills in Tango beats playing and improving on Unreal Tournament 2004 CTF or WoW most of the time. So does it beat playing Torg or GURPS most of the time. You get out, meet breathtakingly awesome and sexy girls, get to hug them for hours on end, your testosterone goes up, your stress goes down, you get exercise, you get healthier, you get cooler and calmer with the ladies, you get to have sex you've only dreamed of or seen in porn-clips ... That all together beats any sort of gaming at any time if you ask me.
A few years ago I've decided to create the poetry and meaning I sought in P&P, Tabletop, TCG and computer gaming in my real life. If not required for the job I avoid and shun intolerant, inflexible and phantasy-lacking douchebags and with the people who's opinion and attention I value I continuosly pull mysellf together, improve my social skills and try to fit in as long as it's an improvement and doesn't collide with my self respect or my identity. The payoff is tenfold and the decades I've spent with nerdy intospection gives me the upper hand in seeing and understanding various forms of insecurity in others. You'd be suprised how nerdy and insecure fashionmodels and perfect 10 ladies are or can be on the inside when you get to know them.
I do still game at occasions. I play GTA Chinatown on my PSP once in a while, I'm chugging away at Prof. Laytons Time Machine Adventure and swap Prof. Layton and other titles with my daughter. And she, her friends and I do some MarioCart DS once in a while (at which then I usually lose most of the time). I've even just now got into contact with a local Shadowrun group again after basically a decade of RPG apstinece, just because I'm longing for a little nerd interaction and discorse with people who are a bit like me. But it isn't by far such a center of my life as it used to be. And that's a big improvement - especially if you think gaming is your only choice of entertainment, poetry and meaning.
Bottom line: If people get out more, do arts, do some social interaction that has a little more meaning than just sitting, talking and getting slightly drunk and thus overall videogaming decreases, that *is* an improvement in my book.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Is it possible that the apparent failure of this device is that people are starting to do what they should be - voting with their wallets? I'm sure there are going to be other factors but it might simply be that there are enough potential purchasers out there that have had enough of Sony and are chosing to save their money or buy a product from a competitor.
I don't see a problem with getting out more, but as good as giving up your hobby for the women is a step too far for me. Shouldn't your significant other accept everything about you, including your nerdy hobbies? I certainly am never going to make that sacrifice. It would be like losing a part of me and/or pretending to be someone I am not.
$20,000 to anyone providing proof of Alexander Peter Kowalski's death.
Post on Slashdot. We will contact you.
Still wondering: who the hell has all of the time and mod points to keep hammering Offtopic on people for replying to this?
Obviously, it must be Alexander Peter Kowalski. He's miffed at all these imposters...
almost all android games are written for the touchscreen.
In these games, how does the player know whether his right thumb is over the jump button, the use primary tool button, or the use secondary tool button? I develop homebrew NES games as a hobby, and when I tried playing one of these using an emulator on my Nexus 7, I kept missing the buttons because unlike on a device with physical buttons, the player can't feel the edges of the on-screen buttons on a touch screen while looking at the action.
Why would you not be looking at it? You're staring at the screen.
My Nexus 7 tablet's screen is 7 inches from corner to corner. I'm staring at the action in the middle of the screen, not the on-screen gamepad two and a half inches away.
Me, I'm just old, set in my ways, and too damn used to the physical feedback of actual buttons.
I agree. It's just that smaller developers aren't allowed to take advantage of actual buttons due to Nintendo's and Sony's selectivity.
We are in the touchscreen gaming generation for portables, even Sony admits this by adding a touchscreen to the Vita
Yet Nintendo kept the physical buttons on the DS, and Sony kept the physical buttons on the Vita, because the companies realize that physical buttons are just better for games in genres that don't involve pointing at on-screen objects. How would one control, say, a platformer on a pure touch device?
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