When the PlayStation Vita launched in 2012, it already had a roller coaster year behind it. The system seemed poised to take on Nintendo’s iron grip on the handheld market, which had been showing cracks with the Nintendo 3DS, by aggressively pricing it identically to its competition and promising an OLED screen and PlayStation 3-caliber graphics.
Now, six years later, Sony has announced that Vita production is ending and that there are no plans for a successor in place, effectively ending Sony’s nearly 15 year presence in the handheld market.
In an interview with Japanese magazine Famitsu, the new PlayStation vice president Hiroyuki Oda made the pronouncement that the Vita, which had already stopped shipping units to the west, would cease production for Japan as well next year. Sony had already announced that they would stop including Vita titles in the monthly PlayStation Plus offerings by March.
Oda did clarify that there is no successor planned right this second, but did not necessarily commit to the idea that there will never be one. For right now, though, Sony’s only platform is the PlayStation 4.
[Source: Famitsu]
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