As the saying goes, “all good thing must come to an end.” Sony has announced that they will be ending production of physical copies of games for their handheld console, Playstation Vita. A Sony representative has contacted Kotaku to confirm this. The North American and European branches of Sony will bring the sales of Vita GameCard to an end this coming fiscal year. Players will have to submit Vita product code requests by June 28, 2018, and that final purchase orders be entered by February 15, 2019. The 2018 fiscal year ends March 31, 2019. Though GameCards are ending, digital distribution of titles will continue.
Playstation Vita launched in 2012 and since then has had a strange life. It was herald by Sony as the system for “gaming on the go” but it quickly fell short to Android tablets, smartphones and Nintendo 3DS. Sony made the puzzling decision to focus solely on the system’s expensive memory cards which made the Vita pricier than it need be, causing big studios to quickly drop support. While the Vita remain popular in Japan, North American and Eurpoean sales have been treading water. The Vita has been a cache box for JRPGs, Japanese titles and indie until it lost that title to the Nintendo Switch. Ending production of the GameCards will more than likely send the Vita into an early grave.
Source: Kotaku
