Sony may be considering re-entering the handheld market, but please don’t let it be a repeat of the PS Vita
Remember when Sony released portable gaming systems that, at their peak, rivaled handheld king Nintendo? Apparently, Sony remembers that too, at least according to a reported statement from the tech giant.
Known leaker, Tom Hendersonclaims that Sony is “paying a lot of attention to the current handheld market” due to its success with the PlayStation PortalThe Portal has indeed proven to be a surprise hit since its release in November 2023, with Sony stating that sales exceeded expectations and that it was reportedly the best selling PS5 accessory until 2024.
It’s not a bad bet considering how the PC handheld market has been booming in recent years thanks to Valve’s hugely successful Steam Deck, which was then followed by other strong entries like the Lenovo Legion Go, the Asus ROG Ally, its successor the Asus ROG Ally X, and more. And Sony is a veteran, who knows how to make a wildly successful, million-selling portable PC, à la PSP.
There is, however, one major stain on Sony’s reputation, a stain that caused the tech giant to pull out of the market and has remained out of it ever since: the PS Vita.
What happened to the PS Vita?
Despite the Vita having great hardware for its time (easy to develop, excellent graphics, smooth user interface packed with features and a very affordable price), the device quickly declined and failed to meet sales expectations.
The worst part is that this failure was largely due to Sony’s own shortcomings. The first and biggest failure was the lack of both first and third party game support. Sony Japan Studio largely shouldered the first party gaming burden and developed many titles for the portable version, but outside of a few meager other ports there wasn’t much support on this front.
Third-party support was also harder to come by, with many developers opting to release titles for Nintendo’s 3DS, which, despite its much weaker hardware, had a much higher install base and would therefore likely yield higher sales. And if the game library is lacking on both fronts, what incentive does a gamer have to invest in said system?
Finally, there was the memory card issue. The PS Vita had very little memory on the micro SD card that came with it, so buyers had to buy other SD cards. Not really a problem, except that instead of making the system compatible with literally every brand of SD card on the market, you could only use first-party cards made specifically for it, which cost several times as much as normal cards and rarely went down in price.
To this day I still grieve for the PS Vita, an incredible portable system that was so thoroughly abused. If Sony does decide to enter the portable PC market, I really hope they learn their hard-earned lessons from the Vita and make sure it gets proper support without the extortionate memory prices.
Sony, please don’t make the same mistake again.