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In a conversation with IGN, PlayStation’s Director of Product Planning and Platform Software Innovation Don Mesa revealed that more than 100 titles will come to PlayStation Vita in 2013 alone. Mesa also had a lot of other interesting things to say about Vita, including usage statistics for Sony’s fledgling handheld device.
“I know there’s been a lot of noise about Vita recently,” Mesa admitted. “There were some negative impressions and so forth. One thing we haven’t had the opportunity to do is talk about how our Vita owners are feeling about the platform. It’s a good gut check for all of us, to know what’s happening now.”
As such, Mesa jumped into the numbers. For starters, a third of all Vita games sold are sold digitally through the PlayStation Network, an impressive number. “Our users are embracing the PlayStation Store on the device and finding it very easy to download and get their games on their device and start playing.”
In a survey Sony conducted with Vita gamers, they learned that they enjoy an 86 percent “satisfaction rate” from the handheld’s users. Sony also found that 90 percent of Vita owners play Vita “on a regular basis,” marked as once a week or more. But the craziest stat? The average Vita owner uses the handheld 18.7 hours every week.
And what about those 100+ games coming to Vita this year? Mesa placed a heavy emphasis on upcoming indie games arriving on Vita – Hotline Miami, Thomas Was Alone, Lone Survivor, Frozen Synapse and others – but he also promised that bigger titles are coming too.
When prodded about Sony’s first-party support moving forward (only two Sony-owned studios are currently known to be making a game for Vita), Mesa promised that Sony’s “got some [games] I the works that I can’t talk about right now. There are games that [Sony] Worldwide Studios guys are building that are… going to be very interesting and innovative, but to give it away too early… we’re always worried about copycats,” Mesa concluded, humorously.
