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Yoshida: E3 conference needed more Vita

Sony Worldwide Studios president admits the handheld was under represented

Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida has admitted that the PlayStation Vita was under represented at the company's E3 press conference.

Speaking to Develop Online, Yoshida discussed a string of tweets he received following the conference that criticised the absence of so many of the games being released for Vita over the next year.

"In retrospect, we should've spent more time showing and talking about our PS Vita titles," he said. "We have 25 PS Vita games playable on the show floor... We could have spent more time talking about those, but we had a very clear intention this year to make the total press conference shorter, because we're notorious for holding lengthy ones.

"I'm hoping that journalists are looking at the games on the show floor and getting the word out that way."

Yoshida also elaborated on the importance of the PlayStation Mobile initiative to realising the Vita's potential. Sony has released an SDK that smaller, independent developers can use to make games for Vita and PlayStation certified Android devices.

"In the past, becoming a certified, licensed developer for the Playstation platform was not an easy thing to do. The development kit was somewhat expensive," he said.

"With PS Mobile, people can just download the SDK from our web site and when they decide to publish their game, they can pay us just $99 per year to become the publisher of their content, so that includes PS Vita."

"In my mind, we are still at the starting phase of realising and showing the potential of PS Vita."

Sony's handhled has performed below expectations since it launched in Europe and the US earlier this year. In March, Sony revealed that it had sold 1.8 million units worldwide, but Yoshida has since ruled out the possibility of a price-cut in the near-term.

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Matthew Handrahan avatar
Matthew Handrahan joined GamesIndustry in 2011, bringing long-form feature-writing experience to the team as well as a deep understanding of the video game development business. He previously spent more than five years at award-winning magazine gamesTM.
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