The PSP certainly had its fans, but even Sony admits it did not live up to its complete potential, especially in the West. President of Sony’s Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida thinks they have the solution with the PS Vita, though.
“What we didn’t do right with the PSP was where we started when we began the development of PlayStation Vita,” said Yoshida. “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.”
However, he promises the games won’t cost a ridiculous amount to produce. Michael Denny has said that development costs of a Vita game is closer to a PSP game, said Yoshida. 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.
Source: GamesIndustry.biz
