Like many others, he had no warning from Sony. 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 closure. The studio’s next game, El Gancho, was also planned for Vita, but the developer can’t make the deadline and will have to cancel. 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 20-40% of projected sales profits. Pablo Checa, a developer from Spain, released his first commercial game in September 2020 for PS Vita, Switch, Xbox One, and PS4. But that’s still a year of his life circling down the drain.Įlsewhere, people are losing money.
Graf says the SwapQuest doesn’t really sell anymore so there’s no financial loss involved, and the title has also vanished from iOS and Android due to the need for constant updates (Graf is no longer an indie dev), so it doesn’t impact him as much as some others. This was originally a title designed for mobile phones in portrait mode and that had to be changed to work in landscape on Vita, “which meant changing every system in the game.”
The game was later released for PS4 and Xbox One, but getting it to work on Vita wasn’t a simple task. Constantin Graf had his first experience with closed systems while porting his mobile game, SwapQuest, to PS Vita. All in all, creating a port would be a few months of work at least.įor some, the porting process worked the other way. Granted - some of that is speculation on my part.”īecause 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. This is just the latest example of Sony's failings when it comes to online infrastructure. Surely if PlayStation's back-end systems were in good order, there could be a one-time migration/upgrade done to unify all content from all previous generations into one store. “It's true that I'm not losing income, but I was pretty angry when I found out about the store closing, to be honest. Maybe at some point in the future, just for the sake of preservation.
“I'm currently developing a new game, so I'm pretty deep into that at the moment. “There are no current plans to port the game to other platforms,” Berry explains. When the store closes, the title will be lost forever without a new port. Meanwhile, other developers are struggling to find the time to create another version of their games.ĭeveloper John Berry spent several years developing Licky the Lucky Lizard Lives Again, a free-to-play, procedurally generated platforming game built exclusively for PS Vita. Despite sensing the change, the developer found out about the store’s closure the same way most other people did: through TheGamer’s report. Still, the Vita closure means three years of development time would have just been thrown away if not for the foresight to port to Switch - which is a non-trivial amount of work. The game was a “financial flop”, but the studio stayed afloat thanks to a limited physical release. Sir Eatsalot was built from the ground up with Vita as the lead platform. The studio predicted this change and decided to work on a Switch port because “the way Sony treated the device was telling”. Until recently, the game was exclusive to the platform.
German studio Behind the Stone released Sir Eatsalot, a 2D platformer for PS Vita, two years ago.
I'll certainly be making sure I download them before they're lost to the ether.”įor many, the loss comes in the form of time. It's sad knowing that those games are a lot less likely to be discovered and enjoyed. The Vita was home to the first games I ever worked on and it's always nice hearing from people who still play those games, or recently picked them up and are enjoying them for the first time. “For me personally, it's also a somewhat sentimental moment. It's especially frustrating given how much effort Microsoft is putting into preserving library and seeing great success with it. “By removing the legitimate option, publishers aren't leaving players with much choice. “ something that needs to happen at a publisher level, otherwise players looking to replay these games will have to acquire them from questionable sources instead of the console they're intended for,” the developer says, referencing the fact that piracy will be one of the only ways to access these games once the stores close.