I remember the day I picked up my pre-ordered Vita. It was an incredible feeling going home and unboxing the thing and booting up that OLED screen for the first time. It was a great little portable, marred by several weird decisions by Sony, most notably the unfairly priced proprietary memory cards. Seriously, a decent amount of storage on this thing costs an arm and a leg, and Sony never really relented on the price. Slowly over time the Vita kind of just died outside of Japan, but every dog has its day: Sony Japan is also giving up on the thing in 2019.
Live at TGS Sony senior VP Hiroyuki Oda confirmed to Famitsu that the Vita is officially dead, and there will not be a successor. It’ll live on for a few months more, but sometime in 2019 they will cease production and that’ll be all she wrote. While things haven’t been going well for a while the hotness of the Switch no doubt contributed to its full-on destruction. The “no successor” official comment also potentially hints at a hybrid Switch-like PS5 system.
There’s been a whole lot of ire directed toward third party developers for canning their Kickstarted Vita ports, but who can blame them? By the time several of them come out the platform will be completely nuked from existence with little to no hope for newly acquired customers. You will be missed, Vita.
Source: Destructoid Japan to end Vita production in 2019: Goodnight, sweet proprietary prince