Is Sony pulling the plug on the Vita?
According to Dutch website Tweakers.net, Sony seems to have stopped sales of the Vita in the Benelux (The Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg). Its Pricewatch section, which indexes thousands of products of major Dutch retailers has only one listing of the Vita left. They reached out to multiple retailers including Coolblue and Bol.com, and received mixed responses.
A spokesperson of Coolblue said that “the PlayStation Vita will no longer be sold, and we don’t expect it to return in our product range.” Bol.com, an official PlayStation retailer, says that the Vita currently isn’t in stock and that they don’t expect any more stock for some time.
Tweakers reached out to Sony Benelux for a reply on the situation, but did not receive a suitable reply. Sony simply comments that ‘there is nothing to report regarding the PlayStation Vita’ and that there will be no additional comments.
While Tweakers mentions that at their time of writing, there were several retailers listed on the Sony website, this is no longer the case. Sony’s official webshop currently says on it’s website: “unfortunately, this model is currently not available at our retail partners”, which makes it seem to me that they’re silently pulling the plug, at least for the Benelux region.
It’s not clear why they are no longer supplying stock to retailers in the Benelux area, as the Vita remains on sale in the rest of Europe. In countries like France, Germany and England, it’s still for sale on websites like Amazon and other online retailers.
While Sony has mentioned before that the Vita is a ‘legacy platform’, a production/sale stop has never been mentioned by them. They did mention that they were no longer going to develop first-party games for the platform, leaving it up to third-party developers to continue supporting the platform. With that mentioned, some developers are not giving up on supporting the Vita, such as DrinkBox Studios’ (the creators of Guacamelee!) recently announced Severed.
At this point in time, I’m not sure what to expect of Sony. The PlayStation TV has been canceled worldwide just recently, and they might just do the same with the Vita in a short period of time.
From my experience and perspective as a game developer, I’d no longer risk developing a title for the Vita, unless I could do it for a very small investment (e.g. porting a title already in development that easily lends itself to the Vita) and an almost guaranteed return on my investment, for example a popular IP that would sell a lot of games. And even then, I’m not sure I would do it. From what I know from the workplace, Vita sales have generally been poor and game development is still a risky and expensive business.
On the contrary, as a gamer I would love to see new and innovative IP, rather than just another port. Unfortunately, there aren’t too many titles like that which I enjoy to play, and it shows in my game collection. I’ve bought three times as many games for my 3DS than I purchased for my Vita, even though I prefer the Vita as a platform.
It’s a shame that this ‘chicken or the egg’-dilemma remains. Both gamers and developers are losers here, as the Vita is a great platform to develop for and an even better platform to play on.
What do you think? Will a spectacular release come and save the day, or will the console slowly bleed to death in the next couple of months?
I would say that it’s going to stop selling in Dutch territories due to lack of consumer interest. Other territories may follow suit but I think it’ll be a couple of years before Sony stop manufacturing it completely, although of course they’ve slowed production of them.
To be honest, shilling the Vita as a Remote Play device as they didn’t know what to do with it was a dumb move. I’ve tried Remote Play back when I bought a Slim just to have one on the most recent firmware and even at home it was a bit laggy and had the odd connection problem, mostly I would assume because the wireless set in the Slim isn’t good enough (it is a cost cutting model that is cheaper to make). Using it at the office on breaks via my phone’s WiFi hotspot was painful, too. GTA 5 was basically unplayable. PS Now was alright though, but the game selection was terrible. I think the best use of it was the dual screen ability built into Deus Ex: Human Revolution [Director’s Cut] and that was just sideported from the Wii U – I know this because the aspect ratio is wrong, it’s 4:3 rather than 16:9 so it looks stretched, so even that was a lazy effort, still, very nice to have on the PS3.
Basically Sony tasked their engineers to make an awesome, versatile piece of hardware. With the original “phat” models sporting the premium build quality and gorgeous OLED screens and front/rear touchpads I believe they succeeded. Every time I pick up my Vita I’m struck by how well it turned out. Sadly, the software isn’t great, and what little there was has been slowly gutted out by Sony in their anti-hacking vendetta. Compare GTA: Chinatown Wars on the PSP to that on the DS, huge difference. Imagine how much better Monster Hunter would have looked. Because the hardware is solid.
Regardless of all this though, the Vita is awesome. The form factor is great – I’ve had a couple of DSes and the form factor makes it look like a toy plus I still find the dual screen thing gimmicky – despite having a tiny library compared to other consoles some of the titles are just great, cross-platform/port notwithstanding. It’s my goto device for :
VITA
* Zen Pinball 2
* Persona 4 Golden
* Metal Gear Solid Collection
* God Of War Collection
* Need For Speed: Most Wanted
* Tearaway
PSP (via TN-V)
* Fight Night Round 3
* Burnout Revenge
* PaRappa The Rapper (lol)
* Pinball Hall of Fame: Williams & Gottlieb
* Tetris (PSP Mini)
SCUMMVM (via TN-V PSP)
* Beneath A Steel Sky
* The Curse Of Monkey Island
PS1 (via TheFloW’s Loader Exploit)
* Gran Turismo 2
* Metal Gear Solid: VR Missions
* Smackdown 2
* Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2
SNES (via RetroArch Rejuvenate)
* Super Mario Allstars & World
* Super Mario Kart
* Donkey Kong Country
* Pilotwings
GENESIS (via RetroArch Rejuvenate or PicoDrive PSP)
* Golden Axe
* The Revenge Of Shinobi
* Micro Machines ’96
* Sonic 3 & Knuckles
And that’s not counting a bunch of other stuff I have installed like MAME4ALL. If you would have told me as a kid that I could carry that many great games around with me I would have been amazed. I’m still amazed now, actually.
So, dead, dying or whatever, I don’t give a ****. It’s still an awesome handheld. And because of the lack of popularity they can be picked up cheap now, especially the original and best OLED models. It was kind of a pain to set up but now it all works great 99% of the time and even with a mere 16GB card I can cram a lot of quality titles on there. I’m happy.
Psvita is still alive with his device playstation tv
The Vita is quite popular in Japan. Last time I checked, it is selling more than an Xbox One. The Vita isn’t dead. It’s just marketed the wrong way in other nations.
Well. It isn’t that difficult to sell more in Japan. The Vita is being crushed by the 3DS. It’s already dead.
Let’s hope things open up on this console quickly so homebrew can give it the love it deserves.
pretty sure the outrageous security over priced memory cards and poor advertising are the main reasons this seemingly revolutionary handheld flopped so hard. wouldn’t have hurt to have better support and less proprietary stuff either. and i don’t wanna hear that all those things kept piracy not happening which wouod’ve killed it faster because 3ds and pc has pirates and stuff is still developed for those all the time. piracy does NOT kill.
“I don’t want to take risk developing for the Vita” is what is killing it in the 1st place :/
If Sony managed to get a Kingdom heart, monster hunter, final fantasy and metal gear solid game at least on PSVita, sales would go to the roof, SIMPLE!
Sony has lost in ps3 and ps4 many sales, because playstation tv reeplacement those consoles, for just one reason is less expensive.
the vita is on the brink of doom, the grim reaper knocking at its door,whispering ever softly “viiitta…viiiitttaaa” and yet STILL we dont have a proper cfw for the dam thing….the ps4 got a cfw before vita did!! and that rejuvenate *** doesn’t count
The Vita has been dead for years. This is no surprise :p
Has to be the worst comment system ever.
Front page says 64 comments, click on it, now there’s 56 comments?
How about upgrading to disqus or even Facebook
that moment i realise i never bought a psvita
Eeee
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R.I.P Vita. I never really did use you. Sad.
E
Oh, Sony is gonna pull the plug? Very nice. No useless updates anymore.
Sony ruined the Vita by removing way too many features and adding almost nothing (they didn’t even fix software design errors) in turn .
Remember the YouTube App? PSMobile? The Google Maps app?
The failed attempt to have the Vita used as a native PS3 controller for *every* game, not just selected (***) ones.
They tried to emulate Nintendo’s GBA ability to hook up the Gamecube to be used as a second screen/controller or just obviously the WiiU.
Well, they did a job on the PS4, but other then that, the “use handheld accessory A for console accessory B and C” thing just is inconsistent.
No hack = Dead Platform!
SEE? XD
PSP is still more popular than VITA… and a lot more hacked !! XD