PS Vita’s Dedicated Memory Cards Were a Mistake, Says Shuhei Yoshida

In a recent interview with Kinda Funny, former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida discussed where they went wrong with the PS Vita. While he names a few reasons why the handheld wasn’t as successful as they’d like, the first answer he gives is its proprietary memory cards.

Former PlayStation exec Shuhei Yoshida also said the PS Vita’s touchpad was “unnecessary”

In the interview, Yoshida names several technical choices as the reasoning behind the PS Vita’s lukewarm success. Most of the factors deal with the handheld’s cost.

“Several technical choices we as a company made weren’t really good ones,” says Yoshida. “One of which was the dedicated memory card.”

“That was a mistake,” Yoshida continues. “People have to spend more money to get the memory card.”

He also lumps in the back touchpad, and OLED as potential factors for the PS Vita’s inevitable demise, albeit for different reasons. The back touchpad he claims was “unnecessary” and added additional production costs. While the OLED screen was beautiful, it also added extra cost to the system. This would eventually become an LCD screen in later iterations of the handheld.

An interesting tidbit Yoshida adds is that the PS Vita dev kit had a video out port, so developers could connect the console to a monitor or TV, and view the game on the bigger screen, similar to a Nintendo Switch. However, he states the hardware team decided to take the feature out to save a few cents on hardware cost.

However, the biggest reason Yoshida believes the PS Vita was not as successful as they hoped was having to develop games for multiple platforms with a limited studio pool. Since console platforms like the PS3 and PS4 were more successful, those consoles would receive support.

Yoshida did crush the dreams of those hoping for a PS Vita successor. Kinda Funny’s Greg Miller asked if PlayStation thought about making a portable gaming device after seeing the success of devices like the Nintendo Switch, and Steam Deck. While his answer is more about his personal feelings on the matter, he says he doesn’t think it is a good idea for PlayStation to enter that particular market.

(Source: Kinda Funny)

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