The PS Vita was a handheld that was far ahead of its time. It tried doing the whole console gaming on the go thing that the Switch is now pulling off with great success all the way back in 2011- but technology wasn’t ready for such a thing to be expected properly back then, and the Vita’s promise was never fulfilled.
Arguably the bigger problem than that, though, was Sony’s total apathy towards the system. They put it on the market, didn’t bother to market it much, rarely supported it with major games (and the games they put on it, they brought over to the PS4 the first chance they got), and publicly buried the system’s prospects by announcing that they were done with it just a few years after it had released.
For all purposes, then, the Vita has been dead for years now, unless you live in Japan, or in some of the PAL markets where it managed to carve a niche for itself as a cheap system for kids; in one of the latter, however, it is also now officially dead. PlayStation Spain confirmed on Twitter today that the PS Vita has been discontinued in the territory. What’s amusing (and sad) is that it might actually have been discontinued a while ago (an exact date wasn’t specified), and this was just the first time someone noticed.
RIP PS Vita. You were a great handheld, but your parents didn’t really care for you.