PS Vita prepares for Euro lift-off

With Vita having made its debut in Japan and other parts of Asia, all eyes are now on its February 22 Euro launch. Sony Computer Entertainment Europe president and CEO Jim Ryan is keenly aware of key of the differences in the approach to each region. “The big difference is obviously the content experiences that people seem to go for in Japan are really rather different to what appeals in the west,” he says. “And it seems like that divergence is greater in the handheld space than it is on traditional TV-based consoles. You’ve got your Monster Hunter phenomenon over there, which never really happened to anything like the same extent in the west. All that being said, the end-of-the-line business approach is pretty consistent.”

There’s a notable consistency in the software launch lineup for each region, too, albeit with a few tweaks – Japan gets home-grown titles such as Army Corps Of Hell and Ridge Racer, whereas Euro regions get Reality Fighters and Wipeout 2048, for example. All territories are bearing witness to Sony’s digital content commitment, too. “There is strong emphasis on digital all around the world,” Ryan asserts. 
“I think the nature of the environment over there [in Japan] makes digital a little easier than in some of the markets in Europe in which we operate, in which the digital way of life is not as well established.”

At Sony’s pre-launch Vita event in London, it’s clear there’s not yet a 100 per cent investment in digital delivery. The lessons learnt through the difficult rollout of the PSP Go hardware still linger on.

Though all physical retail releases will be available for download, there are exceptions in digital-only titles such as Sound Shapes and Gravity Rush, two of the platform’s most striking and appealing early offerings. Such high-profile productions highlight SCE’s continued drive in the download market, and also underline a more specific and strategic targeting of content. It extends to ‘smaller’ productions, too, with Sony welcoming app-style games such as Honeyslug’s WarioWare-style Frobisher Says and app developer Bolser’s AR city-tagging game Tag.

Sony Computer Entertainment Europe president and CEO Jim Ryan

While Sony hasn’t yet caved in to price points outside of its established PSN brackets, the presence of casual games such as Frobisher Says suggests a widening scope for software on Vita. Picking up the final hardware model and firing up its frontend reinforces the fact that Vita is gunning for a wider audience than any Sony platform before it. The Welcome Park is a built-in tutorial disguised as a series of minigames. 
From tapping numbers sequentially to rearranging your photos in tile puzzles, the games are designed to rope in casual players intimidated by hardware that has more than a passing resemblance to its predecessor – a platform that dabbled with the casual market thanks to initiatives such as PlayStation Minis.

It’s part of a grand plan to engage a wider audience with Vita, one that will kick in more aggressively after launch. “Day-one [buyers are] going be our good old core gaming demographic: mid-20s, largely male. What we will look to do is go younger rather more quickly and more deliberately than we did with PSP,” Ryan explains. “You won’t see that so much in 2012, and in 2013 we’ll still be very much at the core of it, but shortly after that a lot of the business strategy will be [based] around targeting a somewhat younger demographic.”

Those day-one buyers have an important decision to make – 3G or not 3G? Ryan sees the £230 Wi-Fi flavour as the potential frontrunner for early sales over its £280 3G-toting brother. “Our belief is that 3G will be attractive to a very large number of consumers, but that Wi-Fi will just shade it,” he says. “All that said, we pride ourselves on our business nimbleness and we’ll adjust very quickly if we’ve called that wrong.”