Bear with me here as I go on another rant. Remember when the Vita was the place to go for good digital deals on indie games? Everyone called the Vita an “indie gaming machine” and they were not wrong: you could get a hell of a lot of bang for your buck, specially if you waited for the monthly PSN Flash Sale. Well, unless you own a Nintendo Switch, now you’re way better off checking out the weather forecast, promotions at Borgata casino or your local butcher, because the Vita well’s gone dry, son.
You see, a lot of the games that thrived on the Vita (and not on the PS4) were indies. They found an audience in the AAA-less world of #VitaIsland. And this was in turn compounded by the fact that once a month, without exception, PSN runs Flash Sales that used to include killer deals on indie and AA-type games. Of course, you had the weekly sales, too. Believe me, if you had a dollar to spend, you were spoilt for choice.
But since Nintendo’s new portable opened the floodgates and let every. single. indie to be published on the Switch, the Vita version of these titles are now not being put on sale at all. I mean, why charge $3.99 for a game on the Vita when you can charge $9.99 for it on Switch and sell even more units?
You have to remember that Vita is now entering legacy hardware stage, so things like storage space and even server access will come into play sooner rather than later. We know that, much like the PSP, Vita will eventually lose access to Sony servers and we won’t be able to download the games we bought. And forget about buying cards to store all your games in, as the going rate for a 64GB Vita memory card is about $100, or about $99 more than it should be.
As a closing thought, let me tell you this, boys and girls: you better get ready for the Vitalypse, pronto. We’re not going to get much more server time. And if you own a Switch, you better enjoy the diversity, because much like Steam, it won’t be too long before you are no longer able to enjoy the quality. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles: when you put out too many games, not all of them can be good.
20-30 indies a week on the eShop? Who thought that’d be a good idea?
Ah, yes… Sony, on the PS4.
That went well.
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