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Cave cans upcoming Vita projects as COO Watanabe resigns

Vita support pulled as handheld popularity wanes

Cave cans upcoming Vita projects as COO Watanabe resigns
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Japanese developer Cave has announced it's cancelled its two titles for Sony's struggling PS Vita.

Cave COO Mikio Watanabe has also announced that he is resigning from the company at the end of the month (31 May) citing personal reasons.

Watanabe will continue his role as representative director until the company's annual shareholder meeting in August. CEO Ito Masahito will become the company's sole representative director in Watanabe's absence.

Caving in

Last year, Cave announced it was working on two titles exclusively for the PS Vita including mobile hit Shirotsuku (Build a Castle), which already boasts 3 million users on the Mobage platform.

The second title was confirmed to be one of the developer's signature arcade shooter games that made use of the Vita's functionality but no further information was revealed prior to its cancellation.

Cave's news comes as sales of Sony's portable powerhouse hits sales of just 1.8 million worldwide since launching in Japan in December 2011.

Despite an initial burst in sales at launch, the PS Vita has been underperforming across the board with hardware pushing as few as 10,000 units on a weekly basis in Japan and a shortage of key titles struggling to keep it afloat.

[source: GameIndustry.biz / Andriasang]

Tom Worthington
Tom Worthington
Fresh out of the packaging, Tom joins Pocket Gamer with a chip on his shoulder and a degree in Journalism. Naively, Tom believes there's a star-studded career in video games and has penned words across the internet in between praying to the almighty Nintendo gods.