When Sony entered the world of handheld gaming in 2004, it provided a new opportunity for developers to chase a different market than had existed before and over the next decade we saw multiple companies, from both western and eastern shores, shift their pipelines to focus on providing software for both the PlayStation Portable and its successor the PlayStation Vita. Despite the latter’s relatively weak hardware sales, there were still successes to be found on the console, which meant that it was easy to plan a future around being a Vita developer.

By 2014 though, it had become clear that Sony were no longer interested in pursuing the handheld market and it left a number of companies in difficulty – they’d either need to adapt to the shifting times, or face dying out altogether. In this article, I’m aiming to look at what happened to these developers who made both PSP and Vita their main focus – how they adapted to the demise of Sony handhelds, what future plans they made and how well they’re doing in the current gaming market.

4 The Players

For many studio, the key to keep going forward was to jump to a more successful piece of Sony hardware – Vita’s bigger brother, the PlayStation 4.

The best example of this is a developer from Sony’s own roster – Bend Studio. While they made a name for themselves as the creators of Syphon Filter on the PS1, most people will know them for their work on handhelds – firstly when they re-birthed Syphon Filter on PSP with Dark Mirror and later when they took other IPs and re-configured them for portable play such as Resistance: Retribution and most notably Uncharted: Golden Abyss. As such, they were definitely revered as AAA handheld developers but following the release of Uncharted: Fight for Fortune, they unsuccessfully pitched a number of portable projects to Sony until they re-focused on PS4 – where they’ve just released the critically-lukewarm but commercially successful Days Gone. It seems they have now secured a post-Vita future, but it’s been a long journey to get here.

Ready at Dawn were in a similar position to Bend, in that for half a decade the majority of their work came from adapting IP’s for handhelds – namely they worked on the brilliant Daxter and two stunning God of War games for PSP. After such a period of hard work and critically acclaimed titles, they were given a shot at making a home console game – sadly The Order 1886 underwhelmed, but they’ve since established themselves as the premier creator of VR content albeit on a rival platform (Occulus Rift) to Sony’s offering (PlayStation VR). Japan Studio were also a handheld-focused studio (responsible for things like Freedom Wars and Soul Sacrifice Delta) and have also followed a similar path to PS4 – releasing a disappointing duo of Knack games, but seem to have found a home for themselves on VR (Astrobot).

Another developer who specialised in handhelds is Nihon Falcom. In 2006, after decades of developing almost exclusively for the PC market, the company took a gamble in releasing Trails in the Sky on the PSP which would begin a love affair with Sony portable hardware that would span dozens of titles for the next 10 years including Ys: Memories of Celceta and Trails of Cold Steel on Vita. Yet by 2016 they could easily see the way things were heading – so they ported Tokyo Xanadu and Ys VIII to PS4 with extra content and seem content on the console since, most recently concluding the Trails of Cold Steel sub-series on it.

Plenty of companies kept the lights on by porting other developers games to handhelds – take for example TT Fusion, a subsidiary of Travellers Tales whose job it was to specifically tailor LEGO titles for portables. After their final release on 3DS and Vita (the rather brilliant LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens), they seem to have been put on rotation with the main team at TT Games, working on full console titles for the PS4, XB1 and Switch. Felistella are another developer who worked with a publisher (Compile Heart) to bring their titles to Vita (the Hyperdimension Neptunia series) and after that avenue of work ceased, a few abortive attempts working on PS4 (including the latest entry in the Genkai Tokki series which began on Vita) have led to eventual success with Azur Wave – something that would have undoubtedly been a Vita game half a decade ago.

There’s plenty more examples of porting studios – Abstraction Games, Blitworks and Sanzaru Games (who ended up working on bringing the best games of my childhood, the Spyro the Dragon trilogy, to home consoles) to name but a few, all of whom have now established themselves as go-to companies for their porting prowess on PS4.

The Switchers

Other companies made early manoeuvres to develop for PS4 but also supported Vita until the end of its life, which paid dividends when a new high-end handheld entered the console race in 2017 which has been a resounding success, making the move across to supporting it an easy… Switch.

For the best example of this, look no further than PQube, localizers of a variety of risqué games on Vita such as Gal Gun, Punch Line and Valkyrie Drive (who were releasing games on Vita right up to the end of 2018). After Sony unceremoniously banned the Western launch of Omega Labyrinth Z due to its questionable content (which undoubtedly cost the company a lot of money), PQube seemed to dive in head-first to the Nintendo Switch market which has paid dividends for them – even though they’re continuing to support Sony’s home console, with releases like Gun Gun Pixies (a Vita exclusive originally) coming to Switch and not PS4, it’s easy to see where their future lies.

A similar situation hit Idea Factory International, the western localization branch of otaku developer Compile Heart, two companies who were absolutely massive on Vita. They’ve recently announced that they’ll be localizing Mary Skelter 2 on Switch but not PS4 (likely due to Sony’s new stance on censorship) – a very obvious ‘pass the baton’ moment, especially since they released the previously Vita-exclusive risqué dungeon crawler Moero Chronicle on Switch in the west prior to this (and they also brought it to PC, which has been a major focus for them over the past few years).

In Japan itself, we’ve seen studios such as Gust – previously a Sony-loyal team who supplemented their PS3 & 4 work with strong-selling late ports on Vita – add Switch into the mix as an extra platform which, although doing nothing to stave off ever-declining domestic sales, seems to be making up for it in the west according to industry insiders. A similar thing happened when Nippon Ichi Software struck gold with a port of Disgaea 5 on Switch (something which would’ve been on Vita in another timeline), which has ensured that all their future plans pivoted away from Sony and towards Nintendo’s handheld (even if it hasn’t managed to offset their financial woes).

The Fatalities

Sadly, for every company that made the jump across to PS4 or Switch and have continued to thrive, there are a handful that couldn’t survive outside Sony’s handheld ecosystem – many of these were even Sony studios themselves or worked in close partnership with them, showing just how devastating Sony’s new focus on AAA console development over everything else has been.

In terms of Sony studios, the end of the handheld line has been a particularly rough time for three developers who did fantastic work on PSP were BigBig Studios (Pursuit Force), Studio Liverpool (WipEout) and Zipper Interactive (SOCOM). They each released a single title for Vita’s launch (Little Deviant, WipEout 2048 and Unit 13 respectively) before they were shuttered by Sony – presumably as their publisher didn’t think they had the necessary skills to develop a hit home console-quality game so it was easier to close them down. It’s super disappointing that there just isn’t really a place in today’s market for such mid-tier studios – this is exactly where the Vita market should have thrived.

By far the biggest fatality in my eyes (although I am a massive fan of Studio Liverpool) was Studio Cambridge, developers of the absolutely sublime Killzone: Mercenary (which remains to this day the most impressive title available on Vita, at least in my eyes). Like Sony Bend, they were masters of bringing other developer’s IP’s to handheld (notably LittleBigPlanet on PSP) but unlike Bend, their shot at redemption (the VR-only RIGS) failed to set the sales charts alight and meant they were quickly closed – another victim of the shrinking market for handheld games.

Elsewhere, Sony’s Iberia branch had actually been one of the most solid supporters of both the PSP and Vita throughout both of their respective lives, albeit not necessarily producing top-of-the-range titles. Family-focused software was the name of the game and no-one better exemplifies this than Novarama, who were at the forefront of implementing augmented reality into console gaming – through the use of the PSP’s camera attachment and the Vita’s built in camera where they were able to create a unique monster-catching series Invizimals.

While the franchise which never managed to achieve worldwide success, it was very popular locally in both Portugal and Spain – which is more than can be said for their rather poor AR fighting game and Vita launch title named Reality Fighters. Their website is still active and to my surprise they are still around, recently revealing that they’re working on a new IP for Steam called KillSquad, but I have my suspicions that if this one flops we won’t be seeing them around much longer (and in any event, it seems they’ve been struggling to find stable work with only one other project in the last 5 years).

A much worse fate befell Virtual Toys, another Spanish studio who worked on family-friendly titles for Sony, although often based on licenced properties like Cars. On Vita, they worked on a trio of titles – a disappointing 2D platformer named Muppets Movie Adventures, a mini-game collection entitled Looney Tunes: Galactic Sports and a 3D adventure in Phineas & Ferb: Day of Doofenshmirtz. None of these were particularly spectacular, but it was reliable output serving a younger demographic yet by 2015 it was clear Sony weren’t going to be funding this anymore (it seems that two projects – Mickey & Friends: The Haunted Mansion and Monsters University were quietly cancelled) – so they tried their hand at the oversaturated F2P MMO market with Pirates: Treasure Hunters on PS4 which presumably flopped and took the company down with it.

A final example from Spain comes in the form of StormBASIC Games who possibly have the most interesting story of all. Starting life as a developer of PS Minis (most notably Tehra: Dark Warrior, a graphically impressive for the time brawler), they seemed to receive a promotion on Vita working on the dull but noteworthy F2P life sim Ecolibrium and the basic but enjoyable MOBA Invoker’s Tournament. Despite the latter being on PS3 and PS4 as well it seems that the company couldn’t sustain itself – both titles had their servers shut down this year and the company closed its doors soon after.

Japan also felt the impact of Sony’s slow withdrawal from the handheld market – take for example Dingo, the developer responsible for the Hatsune Miku titles on PSP. On Vita they got off to a decent start with a strong-selling port of Photo Kano, but after development difficulties with their Love Live! rhythm game (they were also the original team behind Persona 4: Dancing All Night before they were pulled from the project) and the disappointing commercial performance of Reco Love, they tried their hand at a mobile project which flopped and subsequently went bankrupt. Kadokawa recently released a sequel on PS4 entitled LoveR that seems to have sold even worse than Reco Love, suggesting that there just isn’t a market for such games anymore in a post-Vita world.

Q-Entertainment are another studio who seem to have hit difficulties recently – although they haven’t officially closed their doors, their website is inactive and they don’t appear to have worked on any projects since 2014’s quickly-shut-down F2P Vita title Destiny of Spirits (they don’t seem to have been involved in the development of Lumines Remastered at all, despite it being a series they created on PSP and re-birthed on Vita with Electronic Symphony). Meanwhile Imageepoch, who admittedly didn’t develop on Vita at all (but were incredibly active on PSP) went bankrupt after failing to find a stable audience on 3DS.

As a final note, the console visual novel market seems to be rapidly deteriorating, with casualties such as Light (creators of Dies Irae) in recent months and likely plenty more I’m not aware of. In particular, the otome market seems to be imploding as Vita has reached the end of its life, taking down companies such as Quinrose and leaving the future of others in question. The pool of buyers had already dropped massively in the move from PSP to Vita yet stablised enough to support a handful of companies, but seems to be reaching even lower levels as they in turn transition over to Switch – making me wonder if there will be anything left other than Otomate and Ruby Party in a few years (thanks to McFungos from reddit for the information on Light & Quinrose).

Conclusion

I couldn’t for a second say that Vita has had a major place in the gaming market over the past 7 years – after all, it likely sold only around 15 million units of hardware and failed to have any smash hit multi-million selling pieces of software (other than possibly Minecraft, which sells well everywhere). In spite of that, as I’ve detailed in my articles many times before, there are companies out there who made Vita (and PSP before it) a big focus for their output – which in turn was met with a positive reception which ensured support for the handheld through its life.

With that life now coming to an end, these companies must have been left wondering where to go next – usually, the move would be on to the successor hardware (as many developers did, for example, from PS1 -> PS2) which obviously can’t be done here. Luckily, there are plenty of options in today’s market with both PS4 & Switch selling well, yet in spite of this we’ve seen some companies fail to find a new home (there are likely dozens more that I’ve not mentioned here – this is just a small selection of the Vita-dedicated companies who have had to move on). Either way, the situation is a real shame and goes to show that Vita did have a big place in the livelihoods of many developers.