PlayStation Vita

~ the eulogy ~

the vita was sony's second handheld, and you could tell from launch that sony was already over the idea. by december 2011 the iphone 4s was out and mobile gaming had fortified around match-three and gacha. the case for spending three hundred dollars on a dedicated portable from a console maker was thin. sony shipped one anyway. it sold about a sixth of what the psp had sold and was discontinued in 2019.

launch was in japan on december 17, 2011, then north america and europe on february 22, 2012. the hardware was good. a 5-inch oled at 960x544, with the dual analog sticks the psp had famously lacked. the rear touchpad was a flourish nobody had asked for. the bigger problem was the memory card slot, which only accepted a sony-only proprietary format priced as a tax. the device cost 250 dollars and a 32gb card to put games on it cost another 100. that was the vita's first message to the consumer.

by 2013 sony had effectively stopped funding first-party vita titles, redirecting the studios to the ps4 launch. the third-party support followed, with capcom keeping monster hunter on the nintendo 3ds and most western publishers writing the handheld off entirely. the vita's last few years were sustained by indie ports and japanese visual novels, with a remote-play feature for the ps4 filling the rest. sony quietly ended manufacturing on march 1, 2019, after about 16 million lifetime units.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

the launch press for the vita was strong. reviewers liked the screen and the new analog sticks fixed the psp's most-criticized hardware decision. real japanese first-party support showed up in the first year. uncharted golden abyss and gravity rush gave the platform two launch exclusives that critics liked. for about eighteen months, the vita looked like a viable thing.

~ the unraveling ~

the proprietary memory card was the first sign sony was going to milk every accessory dollar instead of growing the platform. the second sign was the silence from sony's own studios after 2013. when capcom kept monster hunter portable on nintendo's hardware, the japanese mass-market case for a vita evaporated overnight. sony spent the rest of the platform's life letting the indie scene carry it, which the indie scene actually did, but never with enough volume to justify continued production.

~ the next chapter ~

nintendo absorbed everything sony left on the table. the switch in 2017 was the device the vita could have been if sony had kept investing, with detachable controllers and the third-party catalog that publishers had refused to give the vita. the switch hit 100 million units inside three years. the vita's lesson for sony was that handheld and console were no longer separate categories, which sony has since taken seriously enough to launch the playstation portal in 2023, a streaming-only handheld that does not even pretend to be a real gaming device.

~ what it left ~

the vita has become a cult object. the homebrew scene cracked it years ago and the device runs an enormous psp and ps1 emulation library at full speed on a screen that still looks good a decade later. you can buy used ones for around 150 dollars and load them with the entire japanese rpg library of the 2010s. for the small population of people who actually want a dedicated handheld with physical controls, the vita is the most fully-formed device of its era. sony just did not want to sell it any more.

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