Sony talks about what they did wrong with the PSP and how they plan to fix it with Vita

PSP? THIS. IS. VITA!!!!!!

Sony messed up with the PSP. Yeah, it did go on to sell over 70 million units and became one of the highest selling systems of all time, but when you look at it all, Sony messed up. SCEE president Jim Ryan recognizes that. While talking to Official PlayStation Magazine UK, he discussed where Sony failed with PSP’s marketting, and how they will not fall for the same thing with Vita.

“I think with PSP we tried to position it as a rather broad multimedia device,” he said. “We talked a lot in the early days of PSP about its video playback functionality its use as a music device and a host of other multimedia functionality that it had.

“I think this time we’ve realised that perhaps ended up confusing consumers, and they weren’t quite sure what the device was really all about. So this time the Vita does all of that stuff that we talked about on PSP, and it does it a lot better.”

Despite the fact that the VIta has a ton of multimedia functionalities, more than the PSP, in fact, Sony believes that this time around, “what it does best is play games.”

“We’ve been a lot more single minded and much more focused in our positioning of Vita,” Ryan continued. “

We’re saying that this is primarily a gaming device. It has been developed from the ground up as a gaming device. What it does best is play games.

“The other thing would be that we learned that what consumers didn’t really appreciate [about PSP] was, in many cases, getting ports of PS2 and then PS3 games for their PSP.

“They said if that’s what you’re going to do, I’ll just play the game on PS2 or PS3. We’re helped here by the nature of the interfaces that are available on the Vita. What we learned is that the gaming experiences need to be unique and differentiated for gamers to be able to get into them.”

Now, was that so hard, Sony? Isn’t that what we have been saying since 2006, when the PSP was first launched? It’s good to see that you’ve finally come around.

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