The PS TV may have outlived its usefulness and be on its way out the door soon. It was announced that Japan will no longer be shipping out any more PS TV’s. When asked for the reason Sony said due to the stabilization of sales with the PS4 and PS Vita the PS TV was no longer needed. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Sony has struggled in the handheld market in recent years. Why is this? Well the obvious answer is that Nintendo has had that market on lock down for years and at this point it would take an act of god to knock Nintendo down. There has also been an overall drop in the handheld market as smartphones get more sophisticated to the point of almost replacing handhelds altogether.
Purely speculation but I highly doubt the Vita is really doing better than it was. More likely Sony has finally accepted that the Vita won’t be able to overcome Nintendo; especially with rumors of the fabled NX floating around which may, to some degree, be a handheld system. The PS TV didn’t exactly do great at release either; the lack of certain Vita features made it impossible to play many games. To be fair, most games released since then have been compatible so it is better than it was. The claim by Sony that the PS TV can play hundreds of Vita games is only true in Japan where anime and visual novel games are released in abundance. The TV did see a large boost to sales when it added Remote Play for the PS4 and a significant drop in price.
What does this mean for the Western market? So far Sony hasn’t mentioned anything about the TV outside of Japan but it is only a matter of time. With Sony already leaking information on its new VR ‘system’ and power glove maybe they are finally giving up on the handheld market to focus on cornering the VR market. E3 should be extremely enlightening this year with so many possibilities, except for Microsoft which has been uncharacteristically mute so far. Most likely though Sony will be dropping the PS TV in order to focus on other things. While the TV has its upsides it still lacks many functions the Vita has with the only exception being its HDMI output. Personally I don’t see why someone can’t build a controller to add some of the missing features but I guess it’s too late now.
