Sony’s recent financials included that the company is anticipating 5 million PS Vita units sold in the current year. After a lackluster launch, the figure looked to be one that saw Sony moving on from a lost cause in the handheld. However, recent comments from a Sony business manager to Gamasutra claim that these are worst case numbers, and that the company has plans in place to try and help sell the handheld. It’s just a matter of whether they pan out or not.
“Sometimes things can happen,” Shahid Kamal Ahmad told Gamasutra when talking about an increase in Vita sales. “And they can dramatically change the evolution in terms of sales of a platoform… Sometimes you’ve had slow starts which have been suddenly sprung to life by a number of activities.”
So what are these “activities”? After Sony’s reveal of the PlayStation 4, it’s clear that there are some reasons to own both the new consoles. Sony showed streaming technology that allowed players to play PS4 games on the PS Vita, which could be a very interesting feature if it pans out. But Sony has also been scooping up deals to work with independent developers as well, and these deals could prove to be the saving grace of the PS Vita.
“If you look back before the mobile era, there was a manageable pool of potential partners, because it was expensive to develop. We saw with the advent of mobile devices that costs came down, and you had different types of content that was appealing at a wide level… I guess what has happened over the last year is that we’ve just engaged with a lot more people that we previously have, simply because there are more people to engage with. It’s meant that we’ve had to reach much more broadly that we’ve ever done before.””
