While the Vita never quite took off in terms of mainstream support, the system managed to find a niche for itself, on the back of some great indie and niche Japanese game support. However, the arrival of the Switch has portended the end of the Vita even on these fronts, with developers of those games, among many others, finding a hugely receptive audience for themselves there.
The Vita is on its way out—that’s a fact. Sony has already announced the end of physical cart manufacturing for the system early next year, as well as the end of PS Plus support. It’s a system that hasn’t otherwise received proper support from Sony in years. It’s not a surprise in light of the Vita’s impending death, and the Switch’s success, that developers and publishers, even those who may have found an audience on the Vita, want to jump off.
One of those publishers is PQube. PQube is known as the publisher of many niche Japanese games, such as the popular visual novel Steins;Gate, as well as BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle in Europe. On a stream on Twitch today, responding to a fan query, representatives of PQube announced that they will be ending support for the Vita, noting that the timelines don’t work out any more, and apologizing, saying that they did try to make Vita happen.
That said, they then let slip an analogy that I am sure will not go down well with a lot of fans of the system. The Vita, they said, is like a gentle bird that can’t fly away, while the Switch is standing there, holding a sniper rifle—a rather long winded way of saying, Switch killed Vita.
Which it did, of course. Just the brutal frankness with which they said it is, well, a bit amusing.
