Sony: Long-term Vita strategy will avoid PSP-like software 'droughts'

Author: by Staff

Scott Rohde is senior vice president of its Worldwide Studios organization, and has been around since prior to the PSP's launch. As the Vita comes out, he comments in a new Gamasutra feature interview about the new handheld's software strategy that applies lessons learned from the PSP. He admits, that in the prior generation, the PSP started to run out of steam due to the struggle the company had in supporting two consoles simultaneously. "This time around, we started planning for development of [Vita] about three years ago, in terms of developing for the software, and how we were going to be able to transition," says Rohde. "I think that there are some that argue that we may even have too much lined up at launch, but I know we've got a lot more in the works," says Rohde, suggesting there won't be any problems with the Vita's long-term health when it comes to software. "I think that there were too many droughts of killer titles [for PSP]. There were too many long droughts, and I think we recognized that. And we've put a serious investment into our long-term PS Vita plans, so there's a lot of stuff in the works." Rohde said that he sees an "incredibly vast difference" between the 2005 launch of the PSP and the 2012 launch of the Vita. He puts this down to "the fact that many teams really struggled to get a comparable experience out the door -- an experience that was comparable to the PS2 -- and there are a lot of teams that are already achieving great heights in that manner for Vita, when compared to the PS3." "I think what was special about PSP in relation to Sony was it was the first time that Sony, as a company, was trying to support two platforms at once. So that, by its very nature, made that launch a little bit rocky. We still did okay. We got some good games out the door." The full interview, which goes into a lot more depth about the launch, including Rohde's opinion regarding Sony's chances versus Nintendo and Apple, is live now on Gamasutra.