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Sony's PlayStation Vita hasn't been doing so great.  Ever since its launch in Japan this December, the number of units sold has been far below what had been expected. The Vita has even been constantly outsold by its predecessor, the PSP. How sad.

Despite the less-than-ideal debut in its native land, Sony is putting its best foot forward with a new marketing campaign for the Vita, which will be launching here in America next Thursday, February 22. According to the New York Times, part of the marketing pitch will be telling users that they'll be able to take the game they were playing at home on a PlayStation 3 everywhere.

John Koller, senior director for PlayStation handhelds, said that the Vita would give users the ability "to feel engaged and still feel like they're playing on a console."  The cost of the Vita's marketing campaign will clock in at $50 million, "the largest platform launch in terms of marketing investment we've ever had," according to Koller. 

The campaign, a collaboration between Sony and Deutsch (a part of the Interpublic Group of Companies), will include TV commercials, billboards, digital banner ads, retail partnerships, and a significant amount of presence in social media. Many of the ads will feature the campaign's theme, "Never Stop Playing", as will the Twitter-influenced hastag, #gamechanger.

In other recent Vita-related news, Sony's president-to-be, Kazuo Hirai, said that the PS Vita was designed intentionally to be, as he put it, "expandable", meaning that the Vita's OS could be made to work on smartphones and tablets.

"If you're asking if we've made it in a way that's expandable, so that it's possible to apply to smartphones and tablets on top of achieving the high responsiveness we need for gaming devices--it is possible," Hirai reportedly told reporters in a Q&A session, according to Japanese website AV Watch. "That doesn't mean that we're applying it to smartphones and tablets at this point in time, but it's been designed with expandability in mind."

CNET, who reported this story, states that the lack of success with Sony's Android-powered smartphones may have been a factor in the company deciding to make the Vita OS expandable. Whether or not they actually do something with that expandability remains to be seen.

Source: New York Times, CNET

Peter Grimm A writer, journalist, and aspiring storyteller, Peter Grimm has been gaming since the days of the Nintendo 64, and reporting on the goings-on in the World of Gaming since late 2011. His base of writing operations is located within the void between Here and There, or so he would have you think.

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