It was a "pretty tough year," said Andrew House, Head of Sony Computer Entertainment, adding that a successful launch of the Vita in North America would boost employee morale in an interview with The Guardian.
However, House also said that all of the hardships Sony endured (Japanese earthquake and tsunami and the PlayStation Network hack) have brought the company closer together.
“Yes, it has been a pretty tough year, no question,” he said. “If I draw a positive out of it, I think that has been unity in the face of adversity… I think it has had the effect of pulling the company together.For the PlayStation business, there was the hacking incident. Not to sound like an excuse, but we’re now in very solid company with many other institutions and companies suffering under the same sort of threat. But it galvanised us.: we’ve hired an extremely experienced chief information security officer. It’s important for the employee base – certainly here in Japan – that there is something of a morale boost with a great product launch,” House added.”From the SCE perspective, I think a lot rests on the success of PS Vita. We went through a very tough time in the company in getting to a point of [PlayStation] profitability, and I think we’re now beginning to enjoy the benefits of that – it gives us some more leeway in being able to look at the future and areas of new investment in terms of new business models and new approaches to gaming.
It's uncertain how the Vita will do in the ever-shrinking hand-held device industry in North America. Though the Vita had a decent enough launch in Japan, sales declined significantly during the Christmas week. It sold 325,000 units first week of release, but quickly plunged to 72,479 the next and even further during the week ending on January 1st with only 42,648 units sold. The 3DS, PS3 and PSP all fared better than the new hand-held.
