The PlayStation Vita, Sony’s final glorious, doomed handheld, is now officially on its way out. Although it was deemed a legacy platform years ago, with no major support from Sony since 2015, minimal to no shelf space at retailers, and plans to end PS Plus support for it next year already announced, soon, it will be flat out impossible to actually release physical games for the thing. A report by Kotaku has confirmed that Sony is ceasing production for PS Vita Game Cards (the cartridges that Vita software runs off of) by March 31 2018.
Sony will continue to take orders for Game Cards by developers through to February next year- this means that any shipments for games from now on are likely to be the final shipments for those games. While you will still be able to purchase (and release) Vita games from the PSN Store, for physical game collectors, this marks the end.
This, then, is another nail in the Vita’s coffin- the handheld never found its footing against the 3DS, and the recent success of the Switch, which is a Vita successor in all but name, has made the Vita entirely irrelevant. The Vita was a glorious handheld- but it was far too ahead of its time, in the end.