Sony's Shuhei Yoshida
The WWS president on creating PS Vita, lessons learned from PSP and the cost of handheld development
What we didn't do right with the PSP was where we started when we began the development of PlayStation Vita. We were very happy with having something very close to the PS2 experience in a portable format with the PSP, but we didn't do a good enough job creating the proper interface to really play games with graphics in 3D. The lack of a right analog stick, for example. That's something we wanted to attack with the PS Vita because we wanted to enhance the portable core gaming experience and we have to do it right. The other thing was that after a couple of years with the PSP people get used to looking at pretty pictures and especially after the launch of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 the expectations for graphics moves on. Just having great graphics on a pretty screen wouldn't have been enough. That's why we spent so much time innovating with user interface devices like the touch pad or camera and motion sensors.
We made sure we know how third-party publishers made their games and that the transition to PS Vita would be smooth
Michael Denny has said that development costs of a Vita game is closer to a PSP game. I wouldn't say it's the same costs as a PS3 game but when you compare to what our teams spent on Blu-ray based PS3 games it's much, much less. Part of that is that because the screen is smaller and the media is much smaller in terms of a card, so developers have to be smarter to create the asset. On PlayStation 3 teams almost have no limits in terms of assets on Blu-ray with 60GB, games like L.A. Noire or Killzone 3 are huge games. Creating assets costs money. Because of the hardware limitation in terms of the size of the games, it pushes teams to be smarter and more economical in terms of creating assets, but still being able to provide a proper game experience. So that helps to reduce the development costs of Vita games.
Well, less on making a PlayStation 3 experience on PlayStation Vita. We made sure the development tools and environment will help achieve that, but we really want our developers to be able to look at all the additional UI's and connectivity features that Vita has, and how you can make their PS3 games even better, more intuitive on PS Vita. When you try Uncharted on PS3 graphically you can compare it to Uncharted 3, but the unique way that PS vita version users the touch, the camera and motion sensors you should feel that this is an Uncharted experience on PS Vita that you can't get on PlayStation 3. That's what we're trying to achieve.
That was one of the goals of developing PS Vita because we never forget E3 2006 when we had Worldwide Studios games on PS3 but we didn't see many third-party games from publishers and developers. We made sure we know how third-party publishers and developers made their games and that the transition to PS Vita would be smooth. We've been getting great feedback from the development community that once they got hands on after a couple of months and they had something up and running very, very fast.
That totally alerted the company because it’s a central strategy for all of Sony to bring together the different devices through the PlayStation Network services. Because of this PSN incident the company has invested much more in terms of securing and monitoring the Network so that we can continue to invest and make use of the Network services across different Sony devices. If the same kind of issues happen further down the road the impact would be even larger because more and more of the value that we provide through Sony devices will depend on the health of our Network services. So this was a very difficult experience