PS Vita – Thanks for the memory (cards)…

It’s a constant frustration with the PlayStation Vita that there never seems to be enough space on our memory cards. With many of us having being fortunate enough to have PlayStation Plus membership packages, and the ever-reliance on digital content for the console, even the largest of memory cards doesn’t seem to last more than a couple of months so we’re left with an ever increasing need to either continually buy more or larger memory cards or continually make use of Content Manager to maximise the storage space at our disposal.

Even though we’re trying to help PS Vita owners through our own PlayStation Vita Memory Card Guide giving as much advice and information as we can to get the most out of this aspect of the console, it’s still not ideal. The Vita is still being held back by some fundamental problems with the current infratructure surrounding its storage and rather than improving, this situation seems to be getting steadily worse…

While the PS Vita supports a range of memory cards of differing sizes ranging from 4Gb up to a healthy 64Gb, we still haven’t heard anything more about an official release for the 64Gb cards in the West. While still considerably more expensive than their MicroSD counterparts, improved distribution of this vital storage would make a huge difference to Vita owners, as would the introduction of cards with even greater storage capacity. While there are cheap 128Gb MicroSD cards on the market at the moment, reputable brands are currently selling for the same price as imported 64Gb PS Vita cards so even if 128Gb PS Vita cards were possible I wouldn’t expect to see them available for under £100, even imported.

The real problem we are currently facing, especially in the UK right now, is of a shortage of basic memory cards. The main distributor for Sony Computer Entertainment software, hardware and accessories is Birmingham-based Centresoft and all they are shipping to retailers are the PS Vita Mega Packs. Infact, these are the only products that they are being supplied with by SCEE right now. While there is no denying the incredible value for money that these offer to consumers, they are also incredibly impractical to gamers. Both my wife and daughter are now proud PS Vita owners and each own several memory cards out of necessity. My wife’s collection started with an 8Gb LEGO Mega Pack which was 80% full just from using the included games, and she needed a second card just to cope with her existing PSM and Minis collection.

In my daughters case, she had had PS+ for a while with her PS3 and thanks to Cross Buy has several cards worth of games! Even buying her the Indie Mega Pack (containing plenty of games she already enjoyed playing on my Vita / PS3) has already left her short of space. Yes, I could go into a store to purchase more Mega Packs for both of them, but that still leaves the issue of either of them not downloading the bundled games, depending on Content Manager or – in stores at least – depending on purchasing pre-owned memory cards. It’s a sad state of affairs that the only way at present to buy any memory card greater than 8Gb for the PS Vita in the UK is pre-owned in a retail store or online and that simply shouldn’t be the case.

The PS Vita has a massive range of games available at retail but we are being told almost daily that the Vita’s future in terms of software lies in digital downloads but if that really is the case then Sony Computer Entertainment need to show us support NOW and give us affordable and readily available storage for the console so we have somewhere to store these games. We want to buy games for the PS Vita but at the moment it feels as if SCEE are doing everything possible to stop us.

Unfortunately, unlike the PSP in the latter stages of its lifecycle, there still haven’t been any third party memory cards released for the PS Vita (even allowing this would make a difference and at the very least would drive prices down as it did with the PSP) and sadly the technology doesn’t exist to allow the use of MicroSD cards with the Vita. While adaptors were developed for the PSP to use them, because of the size of the Vita’s memory cards, at the moment noone has been able to develop a method to use anything other than the official cards on a Vita.

So for now our only choice is to shop around online for the best and most affordable storage options we can, rely more on Content Manager or re-download titles from the store or hope that we find more of the future releases in the Mega Pack series to our liking. Let’s just keep our fingers crossed for some improvements in the future…