Aside from being ridiculously expensive, the proprietary memory cards that are required for the PS Vita serve another purpose, to fight piracy. Not merely a mechanism to save your game files to, the proprietary design of the cards are said to ensure that all Vita players have the same “stable” experience, said Muneki Shimada of Sony.
On the topic of Custom Memory Cards, Andria Sang reports:
“The reason Sony didn’t use general memory cards like SD Cards and instead opted for a custom memory card is because they wanted to make sure they could have something with an equal condition for everyone. Additionally, they were concerned with security.”
These “Vita Storage” units will be required for some games on the PS Vita, but recently exposed as having quite a premium attached to them at release. GameStop revealed that the proprietary storage units range from a 4GB version at $29.99 to a 32GB variety that’ll run you a cool $119.99.