PlayStation Vita was very noticeable during Sony’s Gamescom press briefing due to its complete absence and owners of Sony’s handheld were obviously disappointed not to hear about any new games or future plans.
PlayStation Europe boss Jim Ryan says that PS4 was the focus during the briefing and that lack of time was the reason why Vita was placed on the sideline. Nevertheless, Ryan says that Vita will continue to be supported and, in an interview with CVG, explains that Vita “remains a fundamental part” of PlayStation’s future strategy.
“We continue to support it,” said Ryan. “We like Vita. As we said at E3, there’s over 100 games in development. You know, it wasn’t featured last night because there’s only so much time for these things. PS4 is the priority, we had a ton of stuff to show on PS4 and we just wanted to focus totally on that.
If you start talking about Vita and PS3, the show’s two hours long and everybody’s unhappy about that. So we kept to the PS4. I will say that every single one of those games you saw last night is playable on Vita using Remote Play, and that feature is very valued and the incidence of it is way greater than what we expected.”
It’s interesting that Sony continues to talk about Remote Play for Vita rather than games specifically built for the powerful handheld. A few weeks ago, Sony sent out an email survey that was heavily loaded with questions asking about the Remote Play habits of users. It seems that Vita owners are probably going to have to face the fact that Vita’s future seems largely about playing PS4 games on handheld (and JRPGs), and not so much about the triple-A games that many thought would flood the system.