The PlayStation Vita is struggling. There’s simply no way for anyone to spin it otherwise. Hardware sales are severely lagging and early-adopters and would-be purchasers alike are waiting for announcements and reveals of some must-have games.

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But do some of the industry’s most prolific developers agree? What is their assessment of the PlayStation Vita, where it is right now and where it’s going in the future? The June 2012 issue of PlayStation: The Official Magazine answers this question for us in a short article aptly called Developers on Vita.Ken Levine (BioShock) and Hideo Kojima (Metal Gear) have some positive things to say. “It has dual analog sticks! You can finally play a shooter – a real shooter – on a handheld,” says Levine. “It’s the pinnacle of current gaming technology,” notes Kojima.Then again, not everyone is so excited about Vita’s current prospects. Shinji Mikami (Resident Evil) tells it pretty close to how it is. “Simply put, there aren’t enough good games for it yet. Also, I think the price may be too high. We spend so much money and time on our smartphones these days, and the sort of person who would buy a Vita will likely have a smartphone too. The people who have bought a Vita though seem to be devoting a lot of time to it, but it needs to be cheaper to appeal to the general public. Once there are more great games it should do well.”But others are a little more optimistic. David Cage (Heavy Rain) can even see his own games on it. “I think what we do [at Quantic Dream] would work very well on a Vita. It could be shorter and episodic, something that you’d just play for 10 minutes. The narrative form would work on a Vita, it would work on a PS3. Stories are universal. Everybody’s excited by a story: if it is good and the characters are compelling, you don’t care what platform it runs on.”