The PS Vita remains the most dismal, most acute failure that a PlayStation branded system has been yet. The successor to the 80 million+ selling PSP, it was dropped by Sony in a matter of years after tepid sales, received minimal first party support, next to no third party support, and receded into absolute irrelevance.
However, according to Sony America’s Shawn Layden, the Vita is still a viable platform, which is the height of denial about the system’s fate. Speaking to The Verge, Layden said, “Vita is still a viable platform, chiefly in the Japanese and Asian markets. We still have developers in Japan who are building for that platform. But it just didn’t get over the hump in Europe and America. It’s hard to know exactly why, but it didn’t garner a large enough audience here for us to continue to build for it.”
Now, his statement has several problems- first, his feigning ignorance on why the Vita failed is him refusing to take responsibility for Sony’s fate in the Vita’s failure, with them constantly ignoring it, not putting games on it, refusing to support it with top tier developers, giving it next to no marketing support, and straddling it with expensive Memory Cards. His comment about Japanese support is also a few years too late, as Japanese developers have now begun migrating to the PS4 and Switch, as have the Vita’s indie developers.
In 2017, the Vita is well and truly dead. It was an amazing handheld, and I really love mine- but it ended up becoming what it ended up becoming in spite of Sony. Ultimately, what it did become was but a shadow of what it could have been had Sony had more confidence in the system.
