After slowly winding down support for the Vita for quite some time, Sony has officially announced plans to discontinue production of the handheld in Japan next year.
According to a translation of an interview with the Japanese site Famitsu, Sony Interactive Entertainment’s senior vice president Hiroyuki Oda says that the company plans to end production of Vita in 2019, and has no announcements planned for a successor of any kind at present.
News that the Vita is officially being discontinued likely won’t surprise much of anyone; Sony itself announced that it would stop offering free Vita games to PlayStation Plus subscribers in March 2019 and started winding down production of physical cartridges for the system earlier this year shortly after.
Some developers even have put the kibosh on planned Vita releases of their games by citing Sony’s ongoing lack of support for the system or, in the case of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night creator Koji Igarashi, straight up saying that the company planned to discontinue the Vita a month before Sony made the announcement itself.