Nintendo may have announced, or at least revealed, the Switch 2 on January 16 but Sony just revealed its ultimately doomed Vita console almost stole the Switch range’s thunder.
It’s been so long now that it’s easy to forget the name Switch refers to the ability to switch between the handheld mode and docked mode on the television.
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Now, in reflecting on why the Vita handheld failed, Sony said considered allowing gamers to play on their television sets as well as on the go.
Speaking to the Kinda Funny Gamescast (via Eurogamer), ex-PlayStation bigwig Shuhei Yoshida said the developer version of the PS Vita had a video output.
“The development team removed that feature just to save a few cents of cost,” he said also remarking, without referring directly to the dropped functionality that “several technical choices we made weren’t really good ones.”
Some of those choices have been complained about all along. “One of which was the proprietary memory cards. That was a mistake, people had to spend more money to get the memory cards,” Yoshida said. The also remarked the OLED screen on the Vita pushed the cost up higher than it needed to be.
Ultimately, though, Sony said the Vita may have been doomed because Sony had two consoles on the go and were spread too thin, while Nintendo was only able to focus on one.
Yoshida added: “I think the biggest reason Vita didn’t do as well as we had hoped was that we had to spread all of our efforts/resources into two different platforms. And we didn’t have that resource.”
A less novel Switch?
That’s a bit of a sliding doors moment isn’t it? If Sony had made it easy for gamers to dock a Vita console, might the Switch console felt as novel all those years later? Of course, it’s all about the execution and the Vita was ultimately poorly executed and the Switch was practically flawless and had the games to back it up.
However, it does make you wonder whether that small and flawed decision to remove the video out from the Vita may have somewhat altered gaming history in Nintendo’s favour?
