Are Vita Devs Already Jumping Ship?

According to one report, many Japanese developers are abandoning the Vita in favor of the 3DS. Sony naturally calls shenanigans.

A report published by former head of the Japanese branch of the International game Developers Association, Kiyoshi Shin, attributes the following to an anonymous industry source.

“Major Japanese companies are canceling all projects intended for the Vita and are changing development to the 3DS.”

Now this isn’t the first time Kiyoshi has reported a mass developer exodus – he made similar claims about developers jumping over to the Wii during its meteoric rise to success- but the Vita’s poor sales performance in Japan does lend some credibility to his claim. The Vita is currently being routinely outsold by its predecessor, the PSP.

According to Sony, the report is “largely exaggerated.”

“Extremist quotes like that” is apparently not at all that uncommon for launches of a new product,” said Scott Rohde, Sony’s senior vice president of Worldwide Studios. “I mean, obviously, there is no way anyone could stand in front of a camera and say that all developers are changing focus from one platform to another, no matter what it is.”

“I know many, many, many third party developers and publishers are feverishly working on Vita titles, not just for now, but for the foreseeable future,” he added.

Rohde went on to argue that alarmist stories about developers fleeing platforms like bearded-rats from a sinking ship crop up during every major console release.

“There’s always going to be the hot platform of the moment in our industry,” he says. “There’s always going to be reason to talk about a story like that.”

“You can, whatever — rewind two years ago. Every developer was you knew was selling — going towards — I was going to say ‘selling their soul’, it almost came out — to go build games for Zynga and the Facebook platform. And there’s another time when you see everyone is going to do smaller iPad games, or iOS games in general. Then it was PS3, it was 360, it’s Vita, it’s 3ds. It’s always, constantly changing. It’s not something that concerns me whatsoever.”

Source: Gamasutra