Sony is No Longer Making Vita Games

The PS Vita has been failing slowly for a while now--Sony has even gone on to talk about why it was such a fantastic failure, although the two of us disagree on what it is exactly. Sony says all the extra competition from mobile gaming made a dedicated handheld game console impossible, although Nintendo’s success with the 3DS makes that bunk. I would postulate that the main problem was it required a triple-A budget to make a Vita game, which doesn’t quite jell with the whole point of having a mobile gaming platform.

Regardless, the Vita has been in a downward spiral for a while now, and has finally hit the drain with the latest from Sony: they are done developing games for it.

Oh my.

This doesn’t come from an official source, per se--no press conference or grand retirement party for their most successful mobile console ever. Rather, this comes to us rather anti-climatically from an interview between Japanese gaming magazine 4Gamer and Sony’s SVP Masayasu, who had this to say:
 

"Currently, first-party studios have no titles in development for PS Vita. Since third-parties are working very hard on PS Vita, SCE's own strategy is to focus on PS4, which is a new platform."

So, it’s not as bad as the slightly misleading title would imply, but still, when a developer has stopped making games for their own system, something has gone terribly wrong. In the interview, Masayasu seems optimistic about the future of the Vita with third-party developers, but at least on my end, I feel… less so. If this is Sony’s way of trying to let us down easy, I’d say it’s not working. Not at all.