No plans for a Vita successor, Sony says

Sony has no plans for a Vita successor, it's said.

Sony Interactive Entertainment senior vice president Hiroyuki Oda told Japanese magazine Famitsu (via Gematsu) the company has no plans to launch a new handheld.

In fact, Oda confirmed 2019 will be the last year Sony ships the Vita.

"Currently, we do not have any plans regarding a new handheld device," Oda said. "In Japan, we will manufacture PlayStation Vita until 2019. From there, shipping will end."

So that's that for Sony's Vita, which launched in Japan in December 2011. The PlayStation Portable successor, with its second analogue stick, was billed as a way to play console-quality games such as Uncharted: Golden Abyss on the go, but it failed to take off in the way Sony hoped, and eventually the handheld became the go-to place for smaller-scale games.

With the PS4 dominating the home console battle, the inevitable PS5 waiting in the wings, mobile phones all encompassing and the Nintendo Switch doing a great job of being a Vita successor anyway, Sony clearly doesn't see much need to return to the handheld market.