So the Vita is officially dead.

[Wolf Kanno]

Sony announced they've discontinued the last few models they still make this month (https://www.siliconera.com/2019/03/01/sony-officially-ends-playstation-vita-production-in-japan/), ending the era of Sony's second handheld console. What are your thoughts on the Vita?

[Fynn]

A very nice little piece of tech that was criminally mishandled.

[Fox]

I will continue to get good use out of it for years to come as I have a huge backlog of Japanese VNs and others to get through. Lovely little console, and a shame it was so poorly handled in the west

[Scotty_ffgamer]

It’s possibly my favorite handheld.

[Sarisa]

I don't own a Vita, but I wanted to get one so I could play Tales of Hearts. Everyone I know who had a Vita said they like it, so I'm kind of sad that Sony isn't interested in doing handhelds anymore. From my understanding the Vita suffered from catch 22 syndrome; no one wanted to make games for the Vita until people were buying it, but people didn't want to buy it until it had interesting releases. Maybe this will make the price go down after awhile so I can finally get my hands on one.

[Lord Golbez]

Kind of pisses me off, especially because they're not making a successor, but I guess that leaves the portable market to the switch which is doing quite well with it. Sony has generally been leadimg the industry and I know vita didn't do very well or contribute much to that. Nevertheless, between Switch seemingly getting a lot more ports of third party PS4/XBox titles than previous generations and being portable with no portable option from Sony, I can easily see them losong dominance. Sure they still produce more powerful machines than Nintendo, but for how much longer is that going to matter.

[Scotty_ffgamer]

The main problem is that Sony just never really supported the system since the moment it didn’t do well around launch. The expensive proprietary memory cards didn’t help either.

[Wolf Kanno]

The main problem is that Sony just never really supported the system since the moment it didn’t do well around launch. The expensive proprietary memory cards didn’t help either.

Support was a major problem, but honestly Sony's handhelds had other issues going against them as well. In a lot of way, the PSP itself was like watching a redo of the Game Gear from back in the day. Sure Sony made stronger handhelds, but it cost them a lot of the major features that makes Nintendo handhelds better as actual handhelds such as better battery life, portability, durability, and even their games were not exactly built for the market. I honestly feel that Sony failed with their handhelds because marketed the systems to a player base that really didn't exist in any financially stable way, rather than tapping into the market that was already there.

The PSP was a modest success, but I was surprised they tried again with the Vita, and even more confused that they didn't bother covering any of the weakness the PSP suffered from when designing the Vita. It wasn't just a matter of no one wanting to make games for it because it wasn't selling, technically the system has a far more robust library in Japan than in the rest of the world, but also because it was allegedly difficult to make games for it, and the type of games the system could support really didn't lend itself well for the portable market. Hurting things more was the rise of the actual mobile gaming market that even made Nintendo start questioning the future of the handheld market.So it's not surprising it failed when it was trying to crack Nintendo's nearly thirty year monopoly on the market and then losing even more ground to a third party that even has Nintendo sweating bullets.

I feel the real legacy of the Vita and what Sony tried to do with it can funnily enough be found in the Nintendo Switch itself which made cross play between console and handheld the main feature of the system, which Sony tried to do with both it's handhelds but never really got it off the ground as well due to having too much proprietary elements transforming the idea into a n expensive venture.

[Aulayna]

The PSP and Vita were both really the culmination of good concepts being badly executed and pushed onto the market at the wrong time, and then surpassed in a tighter form factor with the rise of smartphones.