Things don’t look good for the Vita. Recently Sony basically announced that they were dumping the PS TV. Something that really shouldn’t be a surprise for anyone. While it is still unclear what the fate of the PS TV will be in the West it can’t end much better than it did in Japan. Not to mention that Sony has developed very few games for the Vita itself lately, leaving it up mostly to third party developers. My theory has been that Sony is gearing up to drop the entire handheld line in favor of their new VR line. With Nintendo dominating the younger market and older gamers preferring to play games on smartphones to carrying around an entire handheld system, sales have not gone well for the Vita. While the PS TV did revive a little after certain updates and with the price drop it was never really a hit. The Vita is also a vast improvement over the PSP and god forbid the Go but it too never caught fire.
Why are things looking down for Vita again? Well GameStop, the largest provider of games, has dropped the Vita from the toolbar on their website. Generally the toolbar on the GameStop website had a toolbar and each of the major systems had its own button; including PS4, PS3, 3DS and so on. Until recently this included the Vita. Unfortunately the Vita seems to have fallen out of the big boys club and is now stuck with the old school and losers like PS2 and Wii. What replaced the Vita you may be wondering? VR. The Vita was replaced by gaming tech that hasn’t even been released yet. However, a number of companies are starting to take pre orders or in Sony’s case are teasing their own version of VR. With no real release date, extremely demanding specifications and hefty price tags has VR already overtaken Vita? While there is little call for alarm it is concerning; especially with the PS TV news. It is possible this is a marketing ploy to push the VR. The other usual signs of a system getting dropped haven’t appeared yet; like a sudden drop in price or a significant temporary clearance. While this all may be speculation things don’t look good for the Vita.
