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And those ideas do not stop at the PS Vita. But in the years since the PS Vita's release, whatever success that Sony can brag about owes a lot to one man's ideas. The handheld has been beleaguered from the start, and it never quite managed to establish itself as a platform for launching new, exclusive games. Whether that makes the PS Vita a failure is a separate issue. The handheld could be entering the final phases of its life without any viable offspring, as the company concentrates on its hit hardware, the PS4. At least right now, Sony's game makers have abandoned the PlayStation Vita. Together, they paint a dreary picture for the handheld. Neither of those things sound good separately. Then, a few days ago, a PlayStation executive said that Sony's first-party studios have "no titles in development for PS Vita." Just last month, Shuhei Yoshida, the worldwide studios chief for Sony Computer Entertainment, told a panel that "the climate is not healthy" for a PS Vita successor. But its future - and even the future of handheld gaming at Sony - is less than assured.
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It even gained a bit of new life with the release of the PlayStation 4 in late 2013. But it has survived with a fairly steady stream of releases to keep the handheld viable as a platform. It was never an overwhelming sales success, nor was it burdened with a long list of exclusive games. Since its release nearly four years ago, the PS Vita has been, like its predecessor, a mixed bag for Sony. "At this point, I started to feel like I was going to black out." Vlambeer's Super Crate Box appeared as one of about 30 games when PlayStation Mobile launched roughly six months later. A phone call that could have resulted in disaster instead ended in "the beginning of a beautiful relationship," he says. And he remembers that Ismail didn't say anything out of the ordinary, which he thinks means that the attack went unnoticed.įoolish or not, his force of will worked. He remembers an empty Coke that he doesn't remember drinking. He struggles to remember what followed through the haze of a years and shock. Because at this point, I started to feel like I was going to black out." "Like a fool," Ahmad tells Polygon, "I carried on talking, but I didn't know what I was saying. He had what he calls a "full-on hypoglycemic attack." And if Vlambeer agreed to port its popular games, Ahmad thought that could create valuable momentum in the budding PlayStation Mobile platform.Īlone in the office and on a monumentally important phone call with Ismail, Ahmad's Type 1 diabetes asserted itself with prejudice. If an indie developer can be a rock star, Ismail is one of the most famous front men. In late 2011, his role was to convince developers that Sony and PlayStation were good investments worthy of the time and effort it would take to bring their games to these new platforms.Īhmad and the strategic content team had about six months before the technology shipped, and went into "full-on sales mode," he says.Īnd then, on a Friday evening in late 2011, he connected with Rami Ismail of the independent development studio Vlambeer.
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Shahid Ahmad knew this, and his new job was an acknowledgment of that reality. As a result, Sony - which had once been a disrupting titan - had spent the previous few years catching up with competition that had beaten it to market and at the cash register.
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Instead, Sony overshot with the PlayStation 3's high initial price and its newfangled and complex Cell processor hardware. Gone were the days of PlayStation 2, where Sony reigned supreme in the console market. And if it worked, there was the possibility of an even bolder plan. It would have to begin as an act of, if not desperation, then one born of a company that had seen better days. It needed something new, and Ahmad was part of the plan to deliver that. Its first handheld, the PSP, was a moderate seller at a time when its direct, dual-screened competition at Nintendo was finding enormous sales success. Sony's second handheld, the PlayStation Vita, was due to launch late that year in Japan and early the following year in the Americas and Europe. The PlayStation 3 was winding down, and its successor was years away from being unveiled. In those days, Sony was in the midst of something approaching turmoil. Ahmad, the director of strategic content at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, was approaching his 12th hour of work, and he'd been on and off the phone all day, doing his part to save PlayStation. It was a Friday night in late 2011, around 7:30 p.m.