PS Vita is first and foremost a gaming device, says SCEE's president Jim Ryan

Sony's PSP was a promising device when it hit the market back in 2004. It gave you the ability to play games, listen to music, watch films, view photos, and surf the web.

According to SCEE boss Jim Ryan, though, the handheld's varied functionality "confused consumers", which is why the PS Vita is being marketed primarily as a gaming device.

"I think with PSP we tried to position it as a rather broad multimedia device," Ryan stated in a recent interview with Official PlayStation Magazine UK.

"We talked a lot in the early days of PSP about its video playback functionality, its use as a music device and a host of other multimedia functionality that it had."

The PS Vita will still be more than capable of multimedia playback, but its gaming prowess is definitely the focus.

"I think this time we've realised that perhaps [we] ended up confusing consumers, and they weren't quite sure what the device was really all about. So this time the Vita does all of that stuff that we talked about on PSP, and it does it a lot better," Ryan said.

"We've been a lot more single minded and much more focused in our positioning of Vita. We're saying that this is primarily a gaming device. It has been developed from the ground up as a gaming device. What it does best is play games."

Thankfully, it looks like Sony has finally realised that ports of existing console games aren't enough to justify the asking price of a shiny new handheld.

"The other thing would be that we learned that what consumers didn't really appreciate was, in many cases, getting ports of PS2 and then PS3 games for their PSP," Ryan explained.

"They said if that's what you're going to do, I'll just play the game on PS2 or PS3. We're helped here by the nature of the interfaces that are available on the Vita. What we learned is that the gaming experiences need to be unique and differentiated for gamers to be able to get into them."