It appears to be an end of an era for the PlayStation Vita as Sony announced on Saturday that its production for the handheld is officially discontinued. The announcement of the discontinuation of the unit was hinted at last year.
Aside from this, the company also announced that the two remaining SKUs have also been discontinued in the PS Vita’s official product page. Sony senior executive Hiroyuki Oda says that as of this time, the company has no plans yet in developing a successor for the PS Vita.
The PlayStation Vita has sold around 10-15 million units worldwide since its first release. This isn’t even an exact number of units sold as Sony no longer released investor reports on its individual platform sales to the public in 2013.
The first version of the PlayStation Vita (model PCH-1000) was first released in Japan on December 17, 2011, and on February 15, 2012, in North America. The slimline model PCH-2000 was then released in 2013 and 2014. Although the unit has good games that were released over the years, it didn’t really stand out much as smartphones have become a popular handheld and more mobile games were developed and released.
Sony officially stopped producing games for the PS Vita in 2015 and ended production and distribution of physical games for the handheld in 2018. Last February was also the last month the PlayStation Plus subscription service released games for the PS Vita.
The PlayStation Vita was first announced on June 6, 2011, during E3 2011. This was also the time that it revealed its official name to the public using the word “vita” being a Latin for “life”. During its official launch in the West, it released 24 titles which include Wipeout 2048, Uncharted: Golden Abyss, Rayman Origins, and FIF12. The first year of the launch of PS Vita was a massive success but sadly deteriorated as years went forward.
With no word of a new portable handheld to be released by Sony in the future, gamers are now speculating that this could be the end of the era for the company as it shifts its attention to its current hit console PlayStation 4 (with PlayStation 5 expected to be released in a few years).
Source: Polygon
