News recently hit that Sony was set to discontinue the PlayStation Vita in 2019. However, an immediate successor hasn’t been announced. If Sony is (officially or unofficially) leave the portable gaming market, there’s speculation that Nintendo may have the upper hand in dominating the market.
This report from Business Insider suggests that, with the Vita discontinuation, Sony can focus more on the success of its PlayStation 4, as well as its forthcoming PlayStation 5. But that indicates that Nintendo could easily take over with both the Nintendo 3DS and Switch. Which somewhat leads us to our next question; do you consider the Switch to be a portable, hand-held system? Or is it all marketing hype and projecting from Nintendo?
Now, I’ll admit it– I never owned a Playstation Vita. But you can totally bet that I rocked face with my Playstation Portable. I remember the exact moment I gave up on it, too. It was when I purchased Patapon 2 (which was a downloadable title) and couldn’t get the damn thing to go online to download my copy! Annoyed, I put down my PSP and never picked it up again. Similarly with my Nintendo DS, I couldn’t get past a difficult level in Rhythm Heaven and never picked it up again. But I did scratch the screen trying to pull off a sweet rhythm flick with the stylus.
Ultimately, while never hitting the PSP’s explosive impact (UMD movies, anyone?) PlayStation Vita found a good cult audience, particularly with its consistent “indie” releases. In fact, some of those titles are still available for download today.
