Sony Admits Fault in Not Showing Enough Vita at E3 Presser

Sony’s E3 press conference didn’t considerably feature , surprisingly, the PlayStation Vita. With ailing sales for the handheld worldwide, one would have thought their presser would have been a Vita-centric one. It was the exact opposite, though. Sony has now admitted it was their fault for not showcasing the PSP’s successor enough during the conference.

Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida explained to VG247:

It was our fault for not spending enough time on PS Vita content. We have 25 new games on the show floor, playable during E3. And many of them are fantastic-looking games; from our own library is LittleBigPlanet on Vita, which looks fantastic. We could have shown it off, or SoundShapes – coming up in August; it plays great – or some third-party [game] – Jet Set Radio on Vita is amazingly sharp and playable. So we could have shown more during the press conference.

But I observed that the PR team’s one big focus was to make the conference shorter this year. We have been criticised for having a long conference in the past. So this year’s focus was let’s make it very compact and impactful. We have a kind of new thinking going on. But we still have to cover PS3, PS3-exclusive titles, third-party partnerships, and PS Move, and new initiatives on PS Mobile and network services, and PS Vita. If you really look for new information for PS Vita games coming out this year and early next year, we totally under-represented that.

Yoshida did, however, note the several notable titles coming to the platform. When asked if there is a renewed focus in pushing the platform to make it worth owning, he said:

I can answer from two different perspectives. One is we are working on new ideas for PS Vita and just-made-for-Vita kind of projects. One game that I’m really excited about is Gravity Rush, which is coming out next week. That core mechanic, the use of the gyro, is not possible on any other platform. It requires both analog sticks and very high-performance sensors. We just announced a game called Soul Sacrifice. It’s Keiji Inafune’s game; he’s hands-on making games, getting back to creative. A very exciting game, only possible or imagined for PS Vita.

What was announced for the Vita during the presser was Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed 3: Liberation and Call of Duty Black Ops Declassified – both of which had already been confirmed in some capacity before E3 commenced.

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