Remote Play: Half Arsed Attempt At Genius

I recently got myself a Playstation Vita (note my first Sony handheld device) for a little trip I am having for the next 5 months. It is a quality bit a kit and extremely well made but when I decided to dabble in the remote play function, to see how well it works, something dawned on me. Why hasn’t Sony bothered to push this feature?

For those of you who have been living under a rock this generation, remote play essentially does what is says on the tin. You can play your PS3 games over the internet on your Vita. It is such an incredible idea to combat certain issues the dedicated handheld market is having. The big issue is price of games. With more powerful kit the cost of development goes up and so that cost is put back onto the consumer with high retail prices for games. You see some Vita games going for around £30 which is a tall order for a portable game and such it makes it harder to justify the price of the console if the games cost nearly as much as your home console games.

Remote play doesn’t solve the issue but helps the Vita become more attractive to the consumer. There is no better sale than saying to the consumer that the PS3 games you already own can be played on the go through this device with also has device specific stuff as well. And yet, this really isn’t the case at all.

I am not sure if Sony has yet to realise they are unknowingly sitting on a concept which could give them a licence to print money or they are just incompetent but the concept works really well. There is just a large (easily fixable) issue with the amount of games it does work with. I have bought a fair few amount of games (both digitally and physical) and only one title works with remote play. So I pop in my God of War Collection disc and try out remote play and I was amazed and heartbroken at the same time. It work so well but I wondered why can’t I play Uncharted 3, Infamous 2, Far Cry 3………on my vita. There is actually only a small amount of games that use remote play and none of them are Sony’s big PS3 franchises.

It seems Sony are under the illusion that they must appear like they can do what the Wii U can do. This is evident by the Little Big Planet cross play being introduced. Cross play is great and should be included in suitable games but Sony can essentially one up there competitors by saying here is a multi-million pound developed idea on the go.

Sony has out right and said they are clueless why third party developers do not want to develop for the Vita ( http://wegotthiscovered.com... ). A possible solution would be trying to get as many systems into people’s hands. I believe pushing remote play could really do that. Mobiles and tablets are gobbling up this market because they are offering cheap and alternative ways to play and so Sony need to offer something new that fits in with an industry ever shifting to digital distribution.

Obviously a big disadvantage to the remote play I experienced was the disc needs to be in the PS3 to play. But what about those games on the PS3’s hard drive. I have 21 PS3 games on my hard drive mainly due to PSN +. PSN + has made me download more games than I used to. Having that large library is great but what could make this even better is making this library mobile and remote play could do this. I could essentially have 21 games at the palm of my hands but Sony seems a bit inept to really push this feature.

I just feel that Sony should get there finger out and start patching these games to include this feature. Let’s forget this should have been done before the Vita launched and hope Sony did it know rather than later. I can make allowances for third party games that is really up to them if they want to do it but Sony should be encouraging them and at least do it for their own games.