PS vita RAM cut won’t hurt studios – Novarama

[Update: Sony claims that PS Vita’s RAM has not been cut]
Sony’s alleged reduction to PS Vita’s RAM capacity won’t harm developers working with the system, a Sony studio partner has said.

Dani Sánchez-Crespo, the CEO of PSP games studio Novarama, told Develop that the upcoming PS Vita handheld will “have a whole lot of headroom in terms of GPU power, CPU power and indeed RAM”.

But he appeared to confirm that Sony has lowered the RAM capacity of the device since its initial spec sheet was sent to developers.

Asked if the alleged RAM cut will affect Novarama’s own projects, Sánchez-Crespo said: “no that won’t affect us. It’s actually good for developers to work under constraint. Generally for Vita, we still have a whole lot of headroom in terms of GPU power, CPU power and indeed RAM”.

“Remember the PSP had 32 MG of RAM, we have about ten times that now,” he claimed.

“And the system’s battery life, by the way, is really good. You’d think with all the processing power that it would drain fast, but it’s fantastic”.

Sony has never publicly announced the internal memory capacity for its next generation handheld, though it was initially believed to be at 512MB.

Yet in May it was speculated that the platform holder had reduced the system’s memory capacity by half to 256MB.

Sony Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida implied the reduction claim was not entirely accurate.

"Do not believe everything you read on the Internet," he said.

Sánchez-Crespo told Develop that reducing certain PS Vita features could ultimately be helpful to his studio.

“Remember, more hardware features means more costs for buying the handheld. Our main interest is for Sony to sell a lot of [PS Vita] units. Clearly the Sony guys in Japan have a tough job of what to leave in and what to leave out."

‘WE BELIEVE IN VITA’

Sánchez-Crespo’s studio Novarama, which recently announced an exclusivity deal with Sony, is not prioritising PS Vita development for now. The Barcelona studio will first complete the Invizimals 3 project for PSP.

It is likely a key factor in this decision is the PSP’s strong position within the wider games market. The cut-price unit has already sold to a broad consumer demographic, and the theory is that PS Vita’s first wave of buyers would mainly comprise of core gamers.

That means family-oriented games, such as Invizimals, may live longer on the older PSP platform.

But Sánchez-Crespo’s faith in the handhled’s successor was made abundantly clear.

“We really believe in the plan that Sony is putting together for PS Vita. We were stunned when we first got our hands on the handheld,” he said.

“I think the price point was spot-on, when I found out about what they were selling Vita for I was delighted. For a really powerful, slick machine, this is a very aggressive price point.”