Sony has admitted that it was wrong when it planned the distribution of Playstation Vita memory cards.
The Vita recently went on sale in non-Asian territories including North America and Europe. As consumers are realizing, the device is essentially useless unless they buy a separate memory card, which tacks on at least another $20 to the purchase of the system.
But instead of just buying the cheapest memory card available and taking the Vita for a spin, Sony has found that higher-capacity cards are in the highest demand.
And in the UK, Sony made a specific choice not to even bring the 32 GB card to market. The biggest card available is the 16 GB unit, and those are already starting to become in short supply.
“Before it comes to market you just have to guess what people are going to want. We thought they’d want a lot of 4GB cards just as the minimum, and then they buy packaged media. But actually, the way it’s going is, many of the early adopters are clearly going to download a bit more, or just want to buy the big chip in case,” Sony UK’s Fergal Gara said in a Eurogamer interview.
“We’ve already learnt from the early days in Japan that we probably haven’t got big enough memory cards introduced for the UK market. We’ve already gone to secure bigger size cards to bring them into the UK market,” he said.
Since the Vita has no internal storage for users to download games, save files, or content, everything needs to go on a memory card, and there are some game downloads that come in at around 3 GB. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that 4 GB cards don’t really provide the necessary capacity.
