While the PS Vita is a great portable console, it hasn’t had much success around the world. In the four years that it’s been available, it’s faced heavy competition from the Nintendo 3DS, and gaming on portable devices such as mobile phones. In fact, Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida says that because of the latter, a successor to the PS Vita is unlikely at the moment.
In a Q&A session at EGX, Yoshida said:
People have mobile phones and it’s so easy to play games on smartphones. And many games on smartphones are free, or free to start. I myself am a huge fan of PlayStation Vita and we worked really hard on designing every aspect. Touch-based games are fun – there are many games with really good design. But having sticks and buttons make things totally different.
So I hope, like many of you, that this culture of playing portable games continues but the climate is not healthy for now because of the huge dominance of mobile gaming.
So, for the moment, PS Vita fans will have to wait and see if there will ever be a PS Vita 2. Of course, that doesn’t mean a successor is completely out of the question – it just may take a couple of years to see if it’s viable.