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“I think it’s such a shame, to be honest,” Tom Pedalino – a developer who has worked on LittleBigPlanet, Limbo, Frozen Synapse Prime and PixelJunk Monsters for PS Vita tells me. “We’re at a time when there shouldn’t even be a discussion about preserving the game.”
A week ago, we announced that Sony is planning to close the PS3, PSP and PS Vita stores. You can still download and play what you have already purchased, but once closed, games listed in stores will no longer be available for purchase. The exclusives will be lost forever, and nearly two decades of work will be taken away by Thanos in what appears to be a cost-saving exercise, with no consideration for the human cost.
I’ve reached out to independent developers who are wasting years of work and projected income, as well as some who are struggling to beat the deadline to become one of the final Vita games through the pearly doors of the Sony platform.
“[Change is] something that has to happen at the publisher level, otherwise players looking to replay these games will have to acquire them from dubious sources instead of the console they are intended for, ”says Pedalino, referring to the fact that hacking will be one of the only ways to access these games once the stores close. “By removing the legitimate option, publishers are not giving players a lot of choice. This is particularly frustrating considering Microsoft’s efforts to preserve [its] library and see great success with it.
“For me personally, it’s also a bit of a sentimental moment. La Vita hosted the first games I worked on and it’s always nice to hear from people who are still playing these games, or who have recently picked them up and are enjoying them for the first time. It’s sad to know that these games are much less likely to be discovered and enjoyed. I will definitely make sure to upload them before they get lost in the ether. “
For many, loss comes in the form of time.
German studio Behind the Stone released Sir Eatsalot, a 2D platform game for PS Vita, two years ago. Until recently, the game was platform exclusive. The studio predicted this change and decided to work on a Switch port because “the way Sony treated the device was revealing.”
Sir Eatsalot was built from the ground up with Vita as the main platform. The game was a “financial flop,” but the studio stayed afloat with limited physical release. Still, Vita’s shutdown means three years of development time would simply have been wasted without the foresight to port to Switch – which is a sizable amount of work. While he sensed the change, the developer found out about the store closing the same way most other people did: via TheGamer’s report. Meanwhile, other developers are struggling to find the time to make another version of their games.
Developer John Berry has spent several years developing Licky the Lucky Lizard Lives Again, a free, procedurally generated platform game designed exclusively for PS Vita. When the store closes, the title will be lost forever without a new port.
“There are currently no plans to port the game to other platforms,” says Berry. “I’m in the process of developing a new game, so I’ve had enough for now. Maybe at some point in the future, just for the sake of preservation.
“It’s true that I’m not losing income, but I was pretty angry when I heard about the store closing, to be honest. I don’t understand the logic. If PlayStation’s back-end systems were in good shape, there could be a one-time migration / upgrade to unify all content from all previous generations into one store. This is just the latest example of Sony’s failures in online infrastructure. Admittedly, this is partly a matter of speculation on my part.
Because Licky the Lucky Lizard Lives Again was developed specifically for PS Vita, it uses PlayStation’s online infrastructure for leaderboards, which makes the porting process even more complicated if Berry ever chooses to go in that direction. . All in all, creating a port would be at least a few months of work.
For some, the porting process has worked the other way around. Constantin Graf had his first experience with closed systems when porting his mobile game, SwapQuest, to PS Vita. The game was later released on PS4 and Xbox One, but getting it to work on Vita was no easy task. It was originally a title designed for mobile phones in portrait mode and had to be changed to run in landscape mode on Vita, “which meant changing all systems in the game.”
Graf says SwapQuest doesn’t really sell anymore, so there’s no financial loss, and the title has also disappeared from iOS and Android due to the need for constant updates (Graf is no longer a independent developer), so it doesn’t impact him as much as others. But it is still a year of his life that turns in the sewers.
Elsewhere, people are lose money. Pablo Checa, a Spanish developer, released their first commercial game in September 2020 for PS Vita, Switch, Xbox One and PS4. While the game – a shmup called Task Force Kampas – will still be purchasable on other platforms, Checa estimates that the loss of Vita will wipe out between 20% and 40% of expected sales profits. The studio’s next game, El Gancho, was also slated for Vita, but the developer can’t meet the deadline and will have to cancel. Others try to beat him.
Miguel Sternberg of indie studio Spooky Squid Games was working on a PS Vita port of Russian Subway Dogs when he saw the report about the store closing. Like many others, he got no warning from Sony. “As a huge handheld fan, the PS Vita has always been a long-term goal for gaming, so all of the pixel art has been designed to fit the PS Vita and 1080p display perfectly.” , explains Sternberg. “Newer versions of GameMaker no longer support the Vita, so I haven’t made the transition to the new GameMaker Studio 2 and that limits the level of tech support I can access.”
Sternberg is currently racing against the clock in hopes of breaking the looming threshold. However, it seems likely that the port will not make it to Europe as it will have to go through the PEGI Video Game Rating Table first, which will prolong the process. There’s also the issue of contracts, which could restrict its ability to release the Vita version earlier than other platforms.
“Basically it’s a whole new headache on top of the already complex process of getting out to consoles as a small developer,” he says. “The port has truly been a labor of love. We’re well past the point where it’s very profitable to release on Vita, but it’s one of my all-time favorite consoles and I wanted to release a game on it before it all stopped. Most of the “price” of the decision to port Vita has already been paid. This is my first time going through this console coding process – my game development experience is art, not code – so there’s no guarantee I’ll meet the deadline. It’s a lot of stress.
Other developers are also eagerly awaiting projects that have yet to materialize. Astro Aqua Kitty is an arcade shooter announced on April 1 and one of its release platforms is, you guessed it, PS Vita.
“We always thought that developing PS Vita was going to be a risk,” developer Dugan Jackson tells me. “But we still wanted to continue supporting PS Vita because we really love the console, so we continued to maintain the Vita version while we developed the game on multiple platforms.”
Because the Vita is so different from the PS4 and Xbox, the Vita version of the game took a lot of extra time to make sure it performed well and accommodated the system’s memory constraints. This is the version of the game that the team spent the most time achieving.
“The store closure is disappointing for the console as a whole,” Jackson says. “It’s a shame for us too, as it limits the availability of our game after its release in mid-April. But we’re at least happy to release our biggest and best PS Vita title yet, and hope it finds a strong following on Vita before the store closes.
When our report on the shutdown surfaced, a developer, Lillymo Games, reached out to Sony via email and the support ticket system to see if it was accurate. He got no response. When the news first broke, founder Barry Johnson was forced to make the difficult decision to cancel the PS Vita version of the studio’s upcoming game. The developer had worked on this project – codenamed Forest Guardian – in the older version of GameMaker (1.4) specifically so that it could be released on PS Vita. For other platforms, the game must be converted to a newer version of the engine.
“We are working on this older, lower performing engine and converting our work from our dedication to the PS Vita,” says Johnson. “I couldn’t even quantify how much work it cost us at this level, to be honest.”
To make matters worse, the studio purchased a new PS Vita development kit through Sony last month, with no warning of the impending shutdown. Some bigger name developers (who have requested to remain anonymous) have been notified in advance.
Thomas Altenburger of Flying Oak says he got hints from Sony. “We had very strong clues for a while, but we didn’t know the exact time,” says Altenburger. “I can’t be specific because of the confidentiality, but it was pretty obvious where it was going.”
The fact that the store is closing hasn’t deterred him from releasing the studio’s next game on Vita, however. In fact, the store closure is the main reason Altenburger is releasing the next game on PS Vita. “It all started as a joke, actually,” he says. “We hadn’t planned on the PS Vita at all, but when we got these hints of an impending end of support, we took it as a fun challenge and a way of thanking a community that has been surprisingly full of people. ‘hope. all the chances and all the signs. “
Much of the conversation around the shutdown has been about preserving and preserving the games for future audiences, which is one of the main reasons Sony’s decision leaves such a bad taste in their mouths. But we also have to factor in the human cost – yes, the loss of their work, but also those struggling to meet a deadline without warning, developers losing income and all the wasted work that ultimately comes to naught. . . This does not bode well for the all-digital future that everyone continues to threaten us with.
The PS Vita store will close permanently on August 27, 2021.
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