Following the confirmation of PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, and PlayStation Vita store closures, a former Sony employee held a verified Reddit AMA in which they revealed that nixing the Vita was in the cards as far back as 2016/17.
Do note that the ex employee chose to remain anonymous but their employment status was confirmed by Reddit mods. Take everything they say with a grain of salt, but for the most part, there isn’t anything in their responses that raises doubts or suspicions.
“Sony views the Vita as a failure,” wrote the poster. “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 Japan 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.”
The former employee also revealed that Sony planned to introduce trophies to the PSP but abandoned the idea after the infamous 2011 hack.
“After the nightmare that was the 2011 hack, Sony’s terrified of the word ‘hack’ or any potential network intrusions,” they continued. “Fun fact: the PSP was actually planned to have trophies until that firmware was broken and they dropped it like a hot potato.”
When one user asked why Sony has a habit of abandoning beloved IPs, the poster explained that it’s because some of those IPs didn’t perform well in a commercial sense.
“Sony is a business and they care first and foremost about where the money is, not where the sentiment is,” they concluded.
[Source: Reddit]
