PS Vita: Sony has officially ended production

Sony has officially pulled the plug on PS Vita, with the production of the handheld console halted from 1 March 2019. Physical copies of game cartridges for the PS Vita is scheduled to end production by the end of this month on 31 March 2019. The PS Vita is the successor to Sony's older handheld console, the PlayStation Portable (PSP).

Sony had released the PSP and PS Vita after seeing how well Nintendo's handheld systems such as the Gameboy and Nintendo DS sold. Sadly for Sony, the console never saw great sales and people were just not ready for the console. The PS Vita came out in 2011 and this was also when it was competing with a new market of other handheld devices: the smartphone.

The PS Vita even had a casting system, where Sony released the PlayStation TV and allowed for players to play their PS Vita games on their TV. This was a thing before the Nintendo Switch even came out! It even had the ability to connect with a PS4 and play PS4 games on the system. Nintendo's Wii and Wii U had a similar feature.

Sony had given up on the console because of the declining sales numbers. Sony stopped releasing sales numbers in public since 2013 (unless they're doing phenomenally well, like their PS4 sales which are still booming). Game production for the PS Vita stopped in 2015 and last month in February, PlayStation Plus also stopped handing out freebies for the PS Vita.

Shawn Layden, the chairman of Sony Interactive Entertainment had said the following in a 2017 interview with Polygon:

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.

Rest in peace, PS Vita. You had a lot of potential but you did not enter the market at the right time.

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