Saw this on Reddit last night and thought a lot of people on here might find the discussion in the AMA enlightening. A former Sony employee (r/Vita mod vetted) who worked in close proximity to the vita reveals a lot of fascinating information about Sony. I'll post some choice Qs and As below, but I encourage you all to read the whole thread. Not sure if this is posted before, so close me down like I'm the PS3/Vita storefront if old.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/vita/comme...urce=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/vita/comme...urce=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Q:Why is it that Sony dropped first party support? There were so many games on PS3/4 that could've gotten decent ports that would've really rocked (eg Unreal 3 games) but the number of games that really show what it's capable of is quite small.
A:The ROI just wasn't there. Market penetration was weak. While they made an earnest effort to make games in the beginning, when those numbers didn't improve they stopped investing.
The PS3 outsold the Vita about 4:1 and the PS4 outsold the Vita about 5:1. As a Vita fan it sucks, but Sony as a Business was targeting areas where sales potential was higher and mostly left the Vita to third party partners. They still made money on every sale so they were largely happy with accepting it as passive income for most of the Vita's lifecycle.
Q:The Vita firmware has been compromised now for almost 5 years. Is Sony planning to target users of modified firmwares and ban them?
Are they even capable of detecting modified firmwares or unusual activity?
A: They have good telemetry, specifically when you're playing a game you don't have a license for. They also have telemetry to see the names of apps you're running. In other words, yes they know who those people are.
Whether they'll do anything is another question altogether. If they ban your account you can create a new one. If they ban your console you can buy a new one. They think of it like an endless game of whack-a-mole and it's just not a wise use of their resources. Never say never, though.
Q: This is pretty interesting.
Some insight on the Sony disabling the ability for devs to put their games on sale would be interesting to hear about. Seems like the poor choice, but if they had this store closure planned far ahead that makes some sense. Thoughts?
Any other behind the scenes info on Sony's opinions of the Vita would be interesting too.
Thanks for doing this!
A: Killing the Vita has been in the cards since 2016 or 2017. I'd wager that both the store shutdown and nixing the sales ability are steps to get people off the platform, just as the cessation of manufacturing carts/consoles.
Sony views the Vita as a failure. It missed pretty much every sales target they had and for a for-profit business that's about as bad as it gets. They were content with it as a small stream of passive income, but when the firmware was broken they were nailing the coffin.
It had some strong proponents internally, especially on the JP side, but that just served as a "told you so" in the culture wars Sony's been not-so-quietly having for the past decade.
Q: Could you shed light on their culture of IP abandonment? Sony has a wealth of dead franchises and legacy content that they seemingly do not care to bring forward. Was Backwards Compatibility as little used as Jim Ryan claimed? Who made the choice for the proprietary memory card on the vita? Was the unused top port on the vita going to be used for HDMI Out?
Thanks for the AMA!
A: Certain IP has more value in a cultural sense than it does in a market sense. I know it's not Sony, but look at Metroid for a comparison. That franchise is critical to the history of games, but it's sold 20 Million copies throughout its life. The most recent Animal Crossing game outsold that entire franchise. Sony is a business and they care first and foremost about where the money is, not where the sentiment is.
Backwards compatibility is one of the most requested and least used features. I don't know what Jim specifically said about how little it was used, but that is true by the numbers we had.
The proprietary memory card was a hack deterrent. I don't know the name of the specific person who made the decision, but that was the rationale.
HDMI out was one of the prototypes for the accessory port but there was some software issue they needed to work out still. I don't know the full details of what that software issue was but needless to say it never made it to the top of their priority list.
Q: Do you have any insight on what's going on (or already happened) with Sony essentially throwing all of Japan under the bus more recently? Has the US branch taken over the company entirely somehow? And, if so, why and how did the Japanese allow that?
Also, does Sony at all understand their appeal in terms of Japanese game software? Because the more I see them do anything this past generation and currently, the more I think they could be incompetently unaware.
A: There's a lot to it, some I'm going to simplify it at the cost of some nuance.
Playstation is a historically Japanese brand. In the time since Playstation debuted, America has grown to be the largest video game market. There's been a lot of internal competition for the "control" of the Playstation brand and over the past several years you can clearly see where America has been winning. Relocation of HQ, shutdown of most of Japan Studios, and the DualSense's X default confirm (as a final "fuck you") are some of the notable examples off the top of my head.
Most of this took place far above my level - think officers and the like.
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