Sad news for handheld gaming enthusiasts, as Sony brings an end to the PlayStation Vita-- the Japanese giant has officially discontinued the last two Vita SKUs, something the company said it would do earlier last year.
Sony has been planning to bring the Vita to a close for a while now. After all, it stopped working on first-party games for the handheld system in 2015, and stopped producing physical titles in 2018. It even stopped offering Vita games as part of the PS Plus program, to the chagrin of a small but dedicated fanbase.
It is a perhaps sorry close to the story of the Vita, a machine launched with much aplomb back at E3 2011. As a sequel to the successful PlayStation Portable, the Vita promised console-quality games to a handheld format, and it arguably managed to do exactly that. However it launched at a time when smartphones and tablets were proving to be able to handle decent games, leading to lukewarm sales. Further hampering the Vita's chance for success an insistence on expensive, proprietary memory cards, not to mention fierce competition from the Nintendo 3DS.
Will Sony offer a success to the Vita in the near future. Probably... not. Sony appears to be doing more than well enough with the PlayStation 4, and in any case the Nintendo Switch appears to have dominated what market remains for a dedicated handheld gaming machine. Still, the charmingly ambitious Vita (especially the initial model with the gorgeous OLED display) had a place in our heart, and as such will be missed.
