Former PlayStation boss Jack Tretton regrets not having had the weapons to make PS Vita a success. According to him, it was a bit “the orphan” of Sony.
Many have already mourned the PS Vita but Jack Tretton, the ex-CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment America, still has the fatal fate of the small laptop in the air. During an interview with Axios, he said he regrets Sony hasn’t done more to support the console.
The PS Vita “was a bit of an orphan”
The PlayStation Vita might have some great assets to put forward, without real support behind it, it was doomed to failure. And it is precisely this lack of support that Jack Tretton today regrets :
There were some technologies that I thought were good, but didn’t get the support they needed. When you work for a big company, you have to love everything they do. It doesn’t matter if it’s to your liking or not. So you have a new technology to introduce to industry and consumers, but do you have the marketing budget to promote it? Do you have the funds to help developers and incentivize them to design games to support this initiative? And sometimes you birthed a technology in the hope that it would be adopted.
The PS Vita, unlike its big sister the PSP, hit the wall hard. All in all, it will obviously have sold about 15 million units, against more than 80 million for the PlayStation Portable. A stinging difference.
Regrets but no animosity
Such a statement a posteriori could make believe in a settling of accounts. But no, Jack Tretton simply shares regrets and lessons learnedas noted by Stephen Totilo of Axios.
Could the PS Vita have had a better life and massive support from Sony? Absolutely, yes. But if Jack Tretton thinks she arrived too late, she also left at a very bad time. During the PS3 generation, at a time when PlayStation’s finances were in the red. We imagine then that the choice to abandon the laptop to try to get the PlayStation 3 off the ground was perhaps the “most logical” decision in the eyes of the company.
Still, over the years, Sony Interactive Entertainment has tried “to erase all traces of the PS Vita”, which is difficult to pass. Lately, it’s the PS Plus Premium that scrapped the beauty.