AMA sur le subreddit /r/vita d'un intervenant se présentant comme un ancien employé Sony fait le tour des internets en ce moment. Ça cause de l'échec de la Vita, de business, et de la guéguérre interne à Sony qui rappelle de plus en un plus le Sega JP vs Sega US des 90s.
https://www.reddit.com/r/vita/comments/ ... loyee_ama/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.
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.
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Do you have any insight about how early they realized this? I have always thought the release schedule for their first party Vita games to be really bizarre. Nearly all their first and second party games for Vita were released within a year or two of launch. With how long game development can take (even for a mobile platform), it seems weird to me there weren't more of these games slated for 2015 or so. It seems like they literally gave up within months of the launch and we just didn't see it until releases dried up after 2014.
They were skeptical as early as 2012-2013, when their attempts to turn things around (which were half-hearted IMO) with the Slim and PSTV didn't pan out is when they fully acquiesced from my perspective.
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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?
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.
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What was the reasoning behind having no user accessible storage in the original models and only 1GB in later models? Why did they continue using proprietary memory cards after it became obvious how much of an obstacle that was for potential buyers?
The 1 GB decision was largely because of patches IIRC. The ability to DL indie games and stuff was just a nice bonus.
Proprietary memory cards were to deter hacks. It's hard to express just how much of a cultural impact the 2011 hack had on Sony's culture.
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What do you personally find to be the biggest failings of how Sony treated the vita? What do you think they did well?
I think they created a damn fine handheld, but they weirdly gimped some of its capabilities. At the console's launch they only made some of its memory accessible and didn't open it up to devs until later in the lifecycle. They made memory cards proprietary out of hack fears. They never used the accessory port that was on the OG Vita.
I feel like they had a lack of vision for what the Vita could've been because they were laser-focused on the disappointing sales numbers. By all means it could have been a Switch 5-6 years ahead of its time but they decided to more or less fail fast instead of double down.
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Has sony been planning this shutdown for a while? Or did they decide recently to pull the plug? Developers were left in the dark. It seems very sudden, so any insight would be interesting.
It's been a while in the making but when I left there still wasn't a concrete date. As soon as firmware was broken in 2016 or 2017 it was on the chopping block. After the nightmare that was the 2011 hack, Sony's terrified of the word "hack" or any potential network intrusions. Fun fact: the PSP was actually planned to have trophies until that firmware was broken and they dropped it like a hot potato.
I'm not surprised people weren't informed. Sony is composed of these weird silos that people just don't communicate outside of. The right hand doesn't know what the left is doing, as the expression goes.
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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.
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.
Is it possible for you to elaborate on said culture wars?
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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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?
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.
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Why do you think Sony is shutting down the store so abruptly? Surely the passive income from game sales must be better than whatever it costs to keep the lights on, so to speak, no?
I get that the Vita largely failed (or Sony's imagination when it came to the Vita failed), but I don't understand the harm of leaving the store and other basic servers online.
No idea why they gave it such a short runway, but I do think it's part of the planned death of the Vita I've described elsewhere in the thread.
The income question is a bit more detailed, so apologies for the long response.
First and foremost, you have to understand that any game sales the majority of its copies at its launch. There are exceptions to this trend (like games that go through a re-launch, i.e. FFXIV or No Man's Sky), but it holds true 99% of the time.
Second, around the time I was leaving, some Vita games were selling under 1,000 copies in their launch week. It's hard to point the finger at any one cause for this, but we'd theorized it was the result of the quality of the games, the userbase, and the rise of the hack scene.
Third, there's more to running a digital storefront than just keeping servers online. Payment systems require a lot of technical maintenance and deprecated systems provide easy attack vectors for sensitive information. And there's a TON of work involved in making sure everyone gets their money when sales are processed.
I can't say for sure whether the "cost" and "profit" lines ever fully crossed, but I can say that in conjunction with the other reasons I've outlined Sony was pretty ready to be done with the Vita.