Jack Tretton the ex-CEO of PlayStation in the US has revealed that he feels Sony did not support the Vita and other PlayStation products strongly enough. In an interview with Axios, Tretton described how some PlayStation projects were left by the wayside because the division as a whole is one of the more successful parts of Sony.
Tretton specifically named the PlayStation Vita and 3D gaming as two of the PlayStation projects that he feels Sony didn’t support fully.
There were certainly technologies that I thought were good but just didn’t have the level of support they needed.
Jack Tretton
Tretton described how the PlayStation division would come up with projects that it wanted to introduce to consumers but how it didn’t receive the marketing support or developer backing to deliver them.
So you come up with new technology to introduce to the industry and the consumers. But do you have the marketing budget to really drive the message? Do you have the developer support dollars to incent them to develop games to support this initiative? And sometimes you would birth technology and hope that it caught on.
Jack Tretton
That analysis will probably feel familiar to long-time PlayStation supporters, and especially PlayStation Vita fans. The PlayStation Vita never really found its footing in the same way the PlayStation Portable did. A lack of strong developer support for the PlayStation Vita is often cited as one of the major reasons for its failure. Although the console started off strong with big hitters like Uncharted: Golden Abyss, the big titles quickly dried up. Towards the end of the Vita’s lifespan, it had been relegated to a niche machine for JRPGs and visual novels with zero games published by Sony itself, something that is almost unheard of from a console maker.