With sluggish sales worldwide following its recent launch, the Playstation Vita is in dire need of some good news yet it has just received a kicking from Nintendo genius Shigeru Miyamoto.
Speaking to Edge Magazine, the creator of Donkey Kong, Super Mario and the Legend of Zelda series didn’t mince words when asked about the Nintendo 3DS’s rival in the handheld console market.
It’s obviously a very hi-spec machine, and you can do lots of things with it,” Miyamoto said of the Vita. “But I don’t really see the combination of software and hardware that really makes a very strong product.”
Miyamoto blamed the lack of software in the wake of the console launch as the culprit behind the Vita’s sales downturn, claiming that the 3DS suffered the same problem before the combination of a price cut and a couple of mega-selling Super Mario releases.
“When we launched the 3DS hardware we didn’t have Super Mario 3D Land, we didn’t have Mario Kart 7, we didn’t have Kid Icarus: Uprising,” he said.
“We were striving to have all of these ready for the launch, but we weren’t able to deliver them at that time. We were kind of hoping that people would, nevertheless, buy into the product, find 3DS hardware promising, but looking back we have to say we realize the key software was missing when we launched the hardware.”
Sadly, it appears as though the Vita’s fate could very well depend on its showing as this summer’s E3 video game conference, where Sony are expected to unveil the second wave of first-party titles. Let’s just hope that their respective releases are a little closer to a Christmas 2012 launch.
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