PS Vita manufacture and shipping ends in 2019, executive says

A senior PlayStation official has given the death date for the PlayStation Vita: 2019.

Manufacturing and shipping for Sony’s handheld will come to an end sometime that year, Hiroyuki Oda, a senior vice president for Sony Interactive Entertainment, told Famitsu.

Oda also said (via Gematsu) that there are “no plans” for a successor handheld, which is a candidate for this year’s most obvious statement, hardware division. Shuhei Yoshida, Sony’s chief of studios, was saying in 2015 that “the climate is not healthy” for a follow-up to the Vita.

The PlayStation Vita launched in Japan in 2011 (the United States in February 2012) but was buffeted by a variety of trends at the beginning of the decade, including the enormous volume of smartphone and tablet gaming, competition from the Nintendo 3DS, and ultimately a lack of development support.

Sony stopped developing games for its device in 2015, and the platform became something of a backwater for small-scale indie games as opposed to console-sized experiences taken on the go. Earlier this year, Sony ended the production of physical media Vita games, and announced that Vita games would no longer be given out with PlayStation Plus subscriptions.

“For whatever reason, and there are a host of them, and there are even more reasons if we were drinking beer, Vita just didn’t reach that critical mass with the audience and thereby, the development community doesn’t get behind it and thereby, the audience doesn’t come, and it’s a quick negative spiral effect,” Shawn Layden, the Sony Interactive Entertainment of America president, told Polygon in an interview last year.

Let's block ads! (Why?)