PS Vita Owners Might Need to Buy Memory Cards

Well, this put a slight damper on my day as I looked through my RSS feed this morning.

So, Sony's Vita looks like it is going to be a great little handheld. Anything that can play PS2-caliber games portably is basically my dream device. Either way, some time ago there were reports that the new proprietary memory cards for the unit are going to be painfully expensive. Of course, we still only have the Japanese prices (which are always extremely inflated) but even the PSP Memory Stick Pro Duos were pretty pricey for a long time here. I expect the same of Vita.

Now, memory cards shouldn't really be a big deal if you're not downloading games or extras to your system. As the Vita has absolutely NO internal storage anything being put on it requires a card. Simple. The 3DS also has no internal storage but it does at least come packed with a little SD card. It's still unknown if the Vita will come packed with a card or not.

Anyway, needing a memory card for downloaded content is perfectly reasonable. It's just like how you need a hard drive or one of those eensy overpriced memory cards for 360 to save Marketplace stuff. The point of what now bothers me about Vita is that apparently some physical retail games will still require saving to a memory card (Ex: Uncharted: Golden Abyss, Ridge Racer).

It made sense for disc-based games to have memory cards. Video game discs of any type are DVD-ROMs (Read Only Memory). As they are "read only" they cannot have any new data written onto them, which is why all disc-based media requires some storage. Cartridge based games can typically write to themselves, but since most carts we are familiar with could only hold so many KBs or MBs some of the larger saves needed a memory card.

As far as I know, the Vita game cards are rather large in size and will not be completely filled to the brim with game content. Even now, PS3 titles barely ever reach their 60GB Blu-Ray disc capacity. In fact, the majority hover around 5-35GBs. Because of this I don't think it is purely a technical necessity to have physical game carts saving to an external memory card. I think it's business.

This is all just a rumor at the moment but I have faith that this will actually be the case. If it isn't then I will breathe a heavy sigh of relief and resume praising the Vita to no end.