Credit: Pocket-Lint
If you’re hoping for a new Vita, we’ve got some bad news.
The PSP and PS Vita were somewhat odd ducks as far as portable consoles were concerned. They had lots of cool features that other handhelds (or, well, handheld, singular) didn’t have, like video and music playback, web browsing, and lots of social features. What they didn’t have were the games. There were definitely some gems on Sony’s handheld siblings, with a noticeable slant toward JRPGs, but they could never quite match the licensing powerhouse of Nintendo. Now that the Vita is dead and buried, you may have been wondering when Sony will take another swing at portable gaming. Turns out the answer is “not in this lifetime.”
In an interview with Game Informer, Sony Interactive Entertainment’s President and CEO, Jim Ryan, officially confirmed that the company has no plans for any new PlayStation-branded portable consoles for the foreseeable future. “PlayStation Vita was brilliant in many ways, and the actual gaming experience was great, but clearly it’s a business that we’re no longer in now,” he said.
Now, obviously, gaming industry trends shift constantly. For all we know, in a few years, Sony will release the PS Vita 2 like it’s nothing. Sony Interactive Entertainment’s deputy president, John Kodera, mentioned last year that he still wants the company to tinker with portable gaming, at least in an experimental capacity. There is also a possibility that the PS5 could have some sort of portable functionality to compete with the Switch, though what exactly that would entail, I haven’t the foggiest. For now, though, the age of the portable console seems to be coming to a pretty conclusive end. I’ll always remember playing Persona 3 Portable on my PSP.
