sony's been offering me a shitload of bias confirmation in the last couple of years. to be fair, it turns out it was basically scea that was the culprit, but they seem to have full control over the steering wheel now instead of deciding for their region if a game is 3d enough or should be part of a compilation or if it's hd enough. all that arbitrary bullshit seemed specifically targeted at japanese publishers and small localization studios - or was the byproduct of creating their brand one of the bleeding edge of technology, and not a place where everyone could succeed. despite their practices, it was the broadness of the psx and ps2 platforms that allowed for success from basically any genre or any publisher. there was so much growth in the rpg genre, sandbox genre, and action genre because a psx or ps2 game could be almost anything.
i'm not sure when this changed, but the language around the psp in the west was a specific indicator of where the direction would be heading. sure scea was quietly killing the chances of 2d games and their policies quietly killed working designs, but saying out loud that the psp would bring handhelds out of the gaming ghetto was putting a megaphone up to their mouths and declaring what they really thought of the industry. and even when the psp turned out to be insufficiently future-proof and had not and would not ever achieve this goal, scea was still in the process of stonewalling localizations that weren't part of their brand. around the time disgaea 3 was initially blocked behind the scenes and sakura wars 1+2 weren't allowed on psp because they were seen not as games but as text novels. who knows why this shitty decision making fell away. maybe it was the vita being such an obvious failure in the west that scea/siea didn't care about whatever games came to it. maybe they had simply given up on handhelds as a whole early on and didn't tell japan, so they super didn't care about what was coming to vita.
but maybe they should have actually paid attention because the moment they looked away, the vita brand became known for niche japanese games siea didn't care about and worse: gross shit that no one should care about. it's probably their specific negligence to the handheld market that fostered the audience no one should want. but when they went to fix it they did it in the way that required the least amount of effort from them.
and going forward if they don't foster relationships with smaller companies, this fanbase can be wiped clean from the start. if they want, siea can just secure those big japanese games that they care about (basically, final fantasy, from software's games, and capcom's stuff), and finally truly secure their brand as the one on the bleeding edge of technology. in doing so, they'll have a fanbase of whales and superwhales and developers making mobile-as-console games that vacuum all that sweet sweet revenue out from them. anyone else can just stick around and dine on the leftovers.
tl;dr:
-scea wants their brand to be about bleeding edge cool cinematic things
-psx era: no 2d games; ps2 era: gotta be in a compilation; ps3 era: gotta be hd; psp era: no text-based games
-sometime around 2009 or so after the psp had failed, scea stopped caring about the handheld market in general
-scea's inattention to the handheld market led to the rise of a fanbase they didn't care about
-scea's inattention also meant they didn't do anything about this fanbase because they didn't care about the handheld market
-ps vita came and went, but now they were stuck with this thing they should have probably paid some attention to
-siea now has to do some work to scrub this, but they do it pretty sloppily
-siea also just wants whale and superwhale money, so ps5 can probably get rid of those guys from the start (and everyone else!)
