PlayStation Vita: Difference between revisions

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 [[It Got Worse|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 [[Widget Series|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 follwingfollowing 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 wereare 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 [https://henkaku.xyz/ 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.