PlayStation Vita



Sony's successor to the PlayStation Portable, codenamed the Next Generation Portable or NGP for short. It debuted at the beginning of 2011 in a private press conference by Sony and the official name (Vita) was bestowed to the system at E3 2011.

With their two most recent systems falling below expectations in terms of sales, they decided to pull out all the stops with:


 * Instead of using the highly custom console technology that the PlayStation 3 uses, the Vita uses common smartphone technology. This makes game development easier, considering most developers are already familiar to the technology and they are able to use assets from existing hardware ranging from home consoles to smartphones.
 * This is the first widely-available dual analog handheld, addressing a flaw experienced on the PSP.
 * In reaction to the growing casual downloadable game market (such as iOS and Android), Vita features are similar to smartphones, such as a touch screen and motion sensor.
 * The Vita is Sony's first system to use flash cards instead of optical disks for game distribution, which hopefully removes long loading times and increases battery life. Game flashcards are currently able to hold up to 16GB of information. They are based off MultiMediaCards, but have a different pinout and the expected copy protection to deter (casual) piracy.
 * The price was $249 for the wi-fi only model and $299 for the model with 3G support.

While not as powerful as a PS3, Sony intended the Vita to be easy for developers to import assets from their PS3 games to the Vita, and at least some games were cut-down or even unabridged ports of their home console counterparts such as the 2012 Need for Speed: Most Wanted reboot. Several games outright support transferring saves between the PS3 or PS4 counterpart (a feature technically first seen on the PSP and PS3 with Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, and technically included in the older Pursuit Force 2 but the console version of that game never materialized), but the need to purchase the same game twice meant this was actually a great deal less than practical.

Another feature of the hardware is the inclusion of a touch-sensitive pad on the back of the system. The first application was shown at the debut of the system demonstrating Nathan Drake of Uncharted climbing a vine. Sliding your fingers down the touch pad would cause Nate to ascend the vine. The early models of the system also sported an OLED screen (which is normally seen in smartphones), but this was dropped in later models in favor of a standard screen as a cost cutting and battery life measure.

The PS Vita was stated to have a battery life of 3 - 5 hours depending on the system's settings, although in practice battery life was even shorter. An external battery, available at the western launch, could increase that time to 15 hours of nonstop play at full settings.

The console didn't have appreciable internal memory, it must be bought separately, in the format of a Sony Memory Stick, a new type of memory stick which so far is exclusive for the Vita; the PRO and DUO Memory Sticks used by the PSP won't work on it. This would prove to be the biggest cause for Vita's downfall, as the memory sticks were absurdly overpriced compared to commodity (Micro) SD Cards. This would prove to be a problem as games were fairly large, and the system's disc management was locked down in a (failed) attempt to prevent custom firmware with a bizarre oversight in the file management software that rendered it impossible to easily backup saves while deleting game data.

When it was released in Japan, on December 17th, 2011, it did well for a week but lost 3/4ths of its sales numbers the next, being outsold the week of Christmas not just by its main competition, the Nintendo 3DS, but by the original PSP as well. And numbers have only declined since then. Unfortunately, the Japanese market would prove to be the most successful by far, thanks to Japanese developers taking advantage of the lower budgets to make very original and innovative games for the system. The international release would wind up doing even worse, with the cost of the proprietary memory even more absurd (the largest of the memory options never making it to the west), while Sony of America was unwilling to support, and later outright hostile to (outright banning their release or forcing absurd censorship requirements) the oddball Japanese games that made of most of the system's exclusives.

Though despite having been a critical and commercial flop, the Vita did gain a loyal cult following especially in the late 2010s to early 2020s when security researchers managed to successfully defeat the console's security (though certain aspects of it are still being worked on), paving the way for a thriving homebrew scene. While some of these hacks are in the form of unofficial ports of popular Android games to the Vita, others focused on quality-of-life improvements such as adapters which allow commodity SD cards to be used as external storage instead of the absurdly expensive proprietary memory cards. An essential modification is the HENkaku jailbreak, which basically opens the door for modding the Vita and allows for homebrew (and unfortunately piracy). HENkaku in itself isn't persistent and requires the user to reapply it on every reboot, akin to a semi-untethered jailbreak on an iOS device; this can be remedied by installing Enso, which is a custom firmware based on version 3.60 and 3.65 and permanently jailbreaks the Vita, though not without the risk of bricking if you don't know what you're doing.