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The Vita is finally dead - Sony ending production soon

Vita no longer means life

The Vita is finally dead - Sony ending production soon
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Goodnight, sweet prince. Sony's ill-fate PS Vita handheld console is finally coming to the end of its life, with production winding down in Japan soon.

As spotted by Gematsu, the last two consoles currently in production are now both listed on PlayStation Japan's website with the damning phrase "shipments are scheduled to end soon." So that's that.

When exactly production will cease is anyone's guess, though Gematsu reckons that if the PS3 is anything to go by, it'll happen within two months. So by the end of March, there'll be no more new PS Vitas out in the world.

People like to make fun of the Vita a lot, and to be fair, it's not difficult to do - for one thing, it has super-expensive, propietary memory cards in an age where everyone else, including Nintendo, was moving into universal SD cards.

Then there's the whole business with that weird touchscreen on the back which games eventually gave up on using. And then just a total lack of support in general from developers, beyond niche JRPGs and the like.

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It's a shame, because the Vita does have a few really good games on it. Persona 4 Golden, for example, is by far the best game in the entire franchise, and its initially Vita-only spin-off, Dancing All Night, is another gem of a game.

And then you've got the likes of Wipeout 2048, Danganronpa 1 and 2, Gravity Rush, and any number of other games which were eventually rescued and remade for modern consoles people actually owned. But we should never forget where they began - on Sony's expensive paperweight.

Still, hopefully it means that Sony will start massively slashing prices on the PS Vita store in some kind of closing-down sale, because holy hell do some of those games still cost a lot of money.

Ric Cowley
Ric Cowley
Ric was somehow the Editor of Pocket Gamer, having started out as an intern in 2015. He hopes to take over the world the same way.