Sony steps in to bring The Banner Saga to PlayStation Vita

Stoic Studios' tactical role-playing game The Banner Saga looks like it's coming to PlayStation Vita after all, thanks to some assistance from PlayStation's third-party production team. According to a tweet from Sony's Gio Corsi, director of third-party production and developer relations, PlayStation is "partnering with [publisher Versus Evil] to continue work on" the Vita port of The Banner Saga.

Things looked grim for the long-promised Vita version of the game just last week, when Stoic announced the release date for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions of The Banner Saga. Those ports hit Jan. 12, 2016, Stoic revealed last week, but mention of the Vita version was missing.

John Watson, founder and technical director at Stoic, explained at the time that budget concerns and personnel turnover at the company responsible for the Vita port were to blame.

"[We] have had to put the Playstation Vita port on the back burner," Watson wrote on Stoic's forums. "I have been excited about the Vita port since day one, and I would love to see the Banner Saga running on my own Vita. The realities, however, of a very small team and a limited budget, put an immutable check on the speed of our progress. Stoic is composed of only 4 full time internal team members, all of which are currently working 100% on Banner Saga 2. Our initial budget for porting to Vita has been burned by essentially having to pay twice for the console ports. Once we can recover the substantial costs of initial console porting, we can consider our strategy to move forward with Vita."

It appears that Sony is willing to absorb some of those costs, based on today's announcement. Corsi promises more news on The Banner Saga for Vita in 2016.

Sony's third-party production team has worked with developers to port other games, like Gearbox's Borderlands 2 and Capcom's Ultra Street Fighter 4 to PlayStation platforms.