We're used to there being a difference in load times between games installed to a hard drive and those played straight off their respective media. And it's always in favour of the downloaded title, right? Well, reports coming out of Japan where the PS Vita has just launched suggest that the inverse may be true for Sony's new machine. What fresh madness is this? Take a look at the evidence and see for yourself (the downloaded version is the lower of the two):
Why is this happening? Well, we can only assume the proprietary memory card that PS Vita games come on uses a faster data transfer rate than the system's flash storage cards. It won't make much difference in real terms, of course, especially as multiplayer games on Xbox Live work regardless of which players have installed the game or not (although those that have almost always end up waiting for ages while the disc-users slowly load their games). And we're only talking a second or so here and there.
What surprised us is just how long the game is taking to load on either machine. Vita's rival, the 3DS, may have visible load times, but they're nowhere near as long as this. Still, at least the downloadable versions of Vita games do seem to be selling for cheaper than RRP.
For now...
Source: Gematsu.com