Stigma around PS Vita could be driving away devs

"When developers I know hear that I am working on a PS Vita project, because of those sales numbers, their typical response to me is 'Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.'"

- Ex-SCEA developer and Twitchy Thumbs Entertainment founder Jim Buck (Snapshot, pictured) remarks on PS Vita's troubling hardware sales so far, and the stigma of creating games for Sony's handhelds. Sony is already having a tough time convincing game makers to support PS Vita despite the system's poor sales, but it also has to overcome a lack of confidence some studios have for the company's portables. Buck has heard a lot of negativity aimed at PS Vita from fellow game developers, many of them drawing comparisons to what they saw as the failure of PSP (Buck and SCEA insist the system's sales were respectable, just not at the same level as Nintendo DS's figures), writing off the system too early. He notes that when the current home console generation began, companies didn't immediately abandon PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 development just because Wii was dominating at first, yet now he's hearing that publishers are bailing out on PS Vita even though it's not even a year old and hasn't had a chance to really prove itself yet. "There is some weird knee-jerk superstition when it comes to Sony handheld devices compared to other companies' hardware," says Buck. "I've no idea why, but I do fear that the perception might turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy that could have otherwise been avoided." Gamasutra's latest feature, in which Sony and several third-party developers share their thoughts on the current state and future of PS Vita, is now live.