I am thinking about buying the playstation vita and am a little concerned about the cost of memory. If i buy a game cartridge (not downloaded from Sony Entertainment Network), does it take away memory?

If you get the new Vita, they have an internal chip that can be used for saved games. You won't need anything else if you plan on buying game cards. However anything from the PS store you'll need a separate card for, and Sony is overpricing them like mad.

You might be able to fit a few small PSN games on the internal card but I'm not sure as I own the original Vita.

I bought my Vita memory card from Amazon.ca (I am in Canada). Waited for it to go on sale and free shipping made the pill a bit easier to swallow.

I did the exact same thing. Watch the item on Amazon and periodically you'll get one relatively cheap. I think I got a 16 gig card for something like 25 bucks.

Save data is stored on the memory card, but for most games the saves are not that big- a cheap 4-gig would more than do the trick. I just checked mine and for the 20+ games I have it looks like my saves are taking up almost 2 MB.

That's what I did too. Got my 16GB at a relatively reasonable price. Although since my Vita has basically become my JRPG machine I eventually bit the bullet and went with a 64GB one.

But to get back to the main question, no you don't need to get a new memory card. The included one will be fine for just save files.

@officer_falcon: Mine is a JRPG machine and a "Huh, what's free on PS+ this month?" machine.

Ok Thank you everyone who answered. Very helpful :)

Only for saves and patches, most cartridge games would use up very little of your memory card space, but there are a few exceptions, such as Killzone Mercenary which had a 2 GB patch. For most games we're probably talking something like 50-100 MB at most instead.

You need to have a memory card whatever you do, but you can do with a smaller memory card if you stick to cartridge based games.

I went cheap and bought a 4 gig card at first and realized my mistake pretty quickly.

I'm not sure whether to use the 8GB card that comes with the Vita 2000 in the US, or sell the 8GB card and get a 16GB card instead. (will I even be able to get a decent price for the 8gb card?) I heard Borderlands 2 takes up over half of the the 8GB card.

I'm leaning toward sticking with the 8GB simply because that's the one you get in the bundle. Even if I want a 16GB later I might as well find out the hard way as this would be put me in solidarity with everyone else who got the bundle.

I got an 8gb used at GameStop for a fair price, realize though that most games on the store usually exceed 2gb so I would recommend getting the carts as buying those used as well is also way cheaper than what Sony is trying to sell the downloads for

Get a 16GB card at the very least, and a year's subscription to PlayStation Plus as well. The Operating System of the Vita takes away 2GB on the card already and digital games can be anywhere as small as 300 MB to 1-3 GB's. If you are going mainly retail purchase, you'll be fine probably with a 8 GB card but the 16 GB recommendation still stands.

edit: I am told the OS does not take up space on the card. In fact I'm pretty sure this is impossible since memory sticks were never actually required by the Vita when it launched. (save files were handled by the game cart, although some games were exceptions)

Get yourself a memory card. Even with the 1GB built in memory of the new model, it's not worth not owning a memory card. PSN put on a lot of sales, and of games that you cant buy physical copies of for the Vita. Also all the PS+ games are download only so you'll need a memory card for them.

If you intend on hording all your games on one card, go big and get the 64gb. But if you think you'll just swap games in and out a 16gb card should do the trick to have a good few games going at once.

PSN games is where the Vita thrives. The retail stuff is quite limited. A 16GB card is well worth it.