If there's one message SCE Worldwide Studios head Shuhei Yoshida has for gamers, it's this: The PS3 is rocking right now, and he really, really promises he'll make the Vita rock sometime soon.
"The PS3 is at its ripest right now," Yoshida told Famitsu magazine in an interview published this week. "The lineup is diverse, the quality is high, and I'm hoping that everyone is enjoying what we've got set up. If you don't have a PS3 yet, I hope that you'll consider purchasing one of the new models, too. As for the PS Vita, we're working ourselves and alongside third parties to continue to flesh out content on the system, so I hope gamers are looking forward to it."
Certainly, from the first-party perspective, even Yoshida admits that at this exact moment, it may look like they're concentrating a lot more on PS3 development over the Vita. "Looking at the near future, we've got The Last of Us, Beyond: Two Souls, Puppeteer and Rain all coming out in 2013, and those are all new IPs," he said. "Popular series are very important things, of course, but if we concentrated on nothing but that, our lineup would get bland and our creators would lose their inspiration. SCE Worldwide Studios is making it a point to challenge themselves to try new things while retaining their main franchises, and I think we'll be able to show off the fruits of that next year. It's exciting for me, and I think it'll be exciting for everyone else."
But, as he didn't try to deny, the Vita doesn't have that strong first-party support yet; instead, the system's main software sellers in Japan are third-party games like Persona 4: The Golden and Hatsune Miku: Project Diva F.
"I definitely understand that," commented Yoshida. "It's something we've gotten a lot of requests and complaints about on Twitter and so forth. For us, I'm hoping we're able to attract a lot of attention towrads Soul Sacrifice [above], a game we're devoting all our efforts to at Worldwide Studios. We have a lot of titles in the works that we haven't announced yet, either, so I'm hoping users will continue to look forward to the future."