PlayStation Vita Booth

Sony’s Brad Douglas has confirmed earlier rumours that users will only be allowed to access one PlayStation Account per system on the upcoming PS Vita. This is the same system as the previous PSP although the PS3 does allows you to create multiple profiles and share the console with your family and friends. There is one difference between the way the Vita and PSP handle profiles. If you wish to replace your active profile the Vita will require a system format to clear the cache.

This is the result of a business decision over consumer needs. For consumers, one down side would be for parents with young children having to purchase two units, one for each child for both to be able to save their progress, accumulate their trophies and play with friends.

The larger blow to consumers is the inability to explore multi regional PlayStation Store content. It is common practice on the PS3 for gamers to create multiple profiles linked with different regions across the world, the most popular being North America, Europe and Japan. The reasoning behind this is due to the significant segregation of content on each store. The North American store tends to receive content earlier or exclusive to it which European consumers will obtain weeks to months later or never at all. Unfortunately, with the large push in network content Sony have planned for the Vita, many consumers will be unable to enjoy the complete experience offered by all the regional PSN stores. I really hope Sony get their act together and start synchronizing their network content and offers.

Kotaku community member PoweredByHentai provided a good statement as to why Sony would choose to make this decision.

“It is a technical limit. PSN profiles are stored on the HDD for the PS3 whereas the Vita would need to store the profile on its flash memory. Problem is, there probably isn’t enough flash memory to support multiple user profiles, hence the need to clear the cache. Adding more flash memory to the system is the solution but it’ll come at the cost of the Vita being more expensive so there’s your compromise. Using the memory card and appropriating some space as scratch space for PSN profiles is risky, because your PSN profile is now on a removable media that other people could potentially abuse.”

Raising the price point of the Vita will easily be seen as a bigger issue by corporate members over including multiple user profile support and the technical limitations mean we will not see a change to this at least until a second generation Vita is manufactured when component costs are reduced.