The PlayStation Vita is a strong system that more often than not gets the shaft. The PlayStation Vita is Sony's second try at a handheld system that started strong but fell off quickly. Only being 5 years old, its already been abandoned by its parent company, Sony confirmed as much last Oct, but there are plenty of third-party companies finding a home for their games on the system.
Those third party games are keeping the system alive, but for every game that comes to Vita, there are three or four that don't. Even worse, there are many games that are announced for Vita but either the Vita version isn't even in the works until after the console or PC version is released or, worst-case scenario, is outright cancelled.
Recently, One Way Trip was revealed to have a August 30 release date. One Way Trip is a game about an ambiguous protagonist and their brother have both been poisoned and are trying to find the best way to spend the last six hours of their lives. Its a weird way to look at the mortality of mankind and the choices we make as well as how those choices affect others. The thing is, the Aug 30 release date is for PlayStation 4 only. This game was revealed 2 years ago on the PlayStation blog and announced for both PS4 and PS Vita.
Earlier this week, the aforementioned worst-case scenario happened and the PS Vita version of Moon Hunters was cancelled. The lead on the project, Tanya Short of Kitfox, explained that due to quality issues, they couldn't port the game to Vita without reducing the overall quality of the game. This tells me that when the game was in development, they likely didn't plan for PS Vita from the onset and optimized for PS4 and PC. I understand that the Vita isn't your lead platform, all things said and done it is a handheld and they tend to bring is less money, but if there are any kind pf plans that include the Vita as well as the PS4, I would think it best to try to optimize them together. That way you know what you're working with from the get-go and you lessen the chance of one having to fall behind the other to make them work.
Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself, I know little of developing for Vita, but I do know that there are many games that announce cross-compatibility between PS4 and PSVita whether it be cross-buy, cross-play, or cross-save, only to make us wait a year or longer for the Vita version to hit. Sometimes, as with the case of Salt and Sanctuary (which I didn't even know was announced for Vita until recently) we never hear anything about the supposed Vita version at all. At least, until people throw fits on facebook and the devs shoot back.
I know there's no accounting for everything. I know we can't plan for everything. But when a game is announced for multiple platforms, we expect them to happen simultaneously. You never see a game announced for PS4 and Xbox One together, only to stagger the release dates later. It just feels like Vita is getting the shaft all the time. While I'm not justifying the terrible things the internet says when games get delayed, and I know it really isn't anyone's fault things don't go as planned, it's not fair to Vita owners when we're the ones getting the short end of the stick.
