A Eulogy for the PlayStation Vita
I was in middle school when the original PSP came out. leading up to the launch of the PSP the narrative among the students of my middle school was that the PSP was cool, for adults, and will be their all in one media player (this was pre-smartphones) and that the Nintendo DS was for children. I never subscribed to this way of thinking and somehow convinced my mother to get me both consoles. The PSP while a respectable console that sold 80million units and had a decent library still couldn't hold a candle to Nintendo’s 3DS. After watching my PSP collect dust on a shelf for several years I was pretty disillusioned by the promise of experience console gaming on a handheld.
When Sony announced the PlayStation Vita in 2011 I was much older and wiser and felt like I could see what would surely be a failure of a handheld. Two years and an obsession with Persona later and I am hunting for Vitas on eBay, landing a lightly used one for a little over 100 dollars. There are a few ways in which the Vita shines bear mentioning, after all, there is a reason why people are so sad to see it go but there's also a reason why no ones surprised that it's going. The most apparent positive aspect of the Vita is the hardware, it is sleek, heavy, and feels like a powerful machine, which i is, the Vita is capable of some amazing graphics the likes of which I thought were impossible on a handheld console. What really got me to buy a Vita though was its ability to play old PlayStation 1, PSP, and digital indie games on the go, which sadly also doesn't take advantage of the consoles power seeing as most of these games are 2D. That being said you can play Personas 1-4 on the Vita which makes it a pretty amazing console in my eyes.
No one was surprised when Sony announced in May 2018 that they would stop manufacturing physical games for the Vita, I had read articles and seen videos predicting this would happen as far back as 2014. I even think the reason they announced this before E3 was so that we wouldn't have another E3 where we wondered if they would even mention the Vita, they got ahead of it the answer is; no, never. The Vitas shortcomings are remarkably similar to that of the PSP which makes you wonder why Sony didn't learn their lesson from the PSP. That lesson obviously being that no one wants to pay an exorbitant amount of money for your proprietary memory card for really no reason at all other than greed. Honestly, people know how much digital memory should cost, we all see the price differences between your product and Sandisk micro SD cards which to the consumer are functionally the same. This decision really handicaps your console and keeps people from wanting to build a collection of games on your platform, especially considering how many download-only indie titles were released for the console.
At the end of it, all the PlayStation Vita died a death of a million cuts and was the victim of the death spiral that comes with not having enough games come out for your console. There are no games on it so no one buys it so developers don't support it so fewer people buy it and so on until it spirals out of control. The Wii U and Neo Geo saw a similar demise and I hope first parties have really learned that software trumps hardware every time. The PlayStation Vita will be missed but most games worth playing on it came out before the Vita itself, so hop on eBay, I am sure now is a great time to purchase one, may it live one.