After a firestorm of complaints surrounding the launch of Sony’s new Playstation Vita handheld, the company has responded, and is once again forced to eat humble pie.
According to reports, around 300,000 Vita units were sold in its first two days, an impressive number for a Japanese launch.
But many of those customers found themselves disappointed with their purchase, after the system experienced bugs ranging from screen freezes and touchscreen inputs that stopped working, to complete system crashes.
Now Sony has stepped forward and admitted there are problems.
“Currently, our information centre regarding PlayStation Vita as well as our usual customer service centre are receiving many enquiries,” Sony wrote in a message on its Japanese Playstation website, according to a translation from the BBC.
The message goes on to apologize to customers for long hold times for telephone customer service.
Sony has issued a firmware update that it hopes will address some of the issues. In addition, “Some issues regarding PlayStation Vita can be addressed by simple procedures at home,” the company said.
This is of course not the first Playstation fiasco of the year. Sony was at the mercy of millions of angry PS3 owners several months ago when hacker managed to break into the online Playstation Network infrastructure, forcing Sony to shut down all PS3 online features for more than a month (the company originally promised the issue would be resolve in about a week).
The Vita is due out in February for the US. Hopefully these kinks will be worked out before then.
