Sony's plans for 2015 and beyond do not include the PlayStation Vita, that's made clear in the company's new
strategy document. Also, Sony CEO Andrew House described it to investors as a "legacy device" which is polite talk for "dead as some doo-doo."
UPDATE: Sony has
tried to backtrack on Andy's comment, saying basically, "legacy" only meant the first-gen Vita write offs, and it will continue to support the new Vita 2000 and PS TV. But with no Vita news in their presentation, and no new games under development, that will trigger the bullshit alarm in all of us. Also, Andy House is a shrewd dude who knows what's he talking about, so I'd believe his comment over generic anonymous PR hack!
While the main focus is on PlayStation 4, and rightly so, instead of keeping the Vita running, Sony is risking its PS4-driven recovery with huge bets on services like:
- Playstation Vue (since most people already have a Netflix, Amazon Prime or a cable on-demand service, why would they want a late-to-the-market effort?)
- Project Morpheus (no one has made money on VR yet and there's a good chance that Sony will be a high profile casualty if this comes out as over-priced and catalogue limited)
- PlayStation Now (only viable when it has a massive subscriber base due to the massive infrastructure costs, and with Sony treating it like a drip-feed service rather than an a la carta menu, that won't happen).
The only mention of the Vita in Sony's bumper fun investment booklet is in the recent write-off of assets. So, while Sony may keep it running in a holding pattern for Japan, expect no investment whatsoever in the west. That's already happening with indies focusing on PS4 only, Cross Play rapidly becoming redundant and all effort from a few third parties.
Of course, Sony could be holding back anything it
wants to announce at E3 from this report, but the chances of anything major Vita-related coming out of that are next to nothing. Instead, as most of us know, the future is niche, but the Vita's life is far from over, just because its creator doesn't love it anymore.
