PlayStation Vita
2011, December 17
The PlayStation Vita (PS Vita) is a handheld game console developed and marketed by Sony Computer Entertainment. It was first released in Japan on December 17, 2011, then in other international territories on February 22, 2012, and was produced until discontinuation on March 1, 2019. The console is the successor to the PlayStation Portable (PSP), and a part of the PlayStation brand of gaming devices; as part of the eighth generation of video game consoles, it primarily competed with the Nintendo 3DS.
The original model of the handheld includes a 5-inch (130 mm) OLED multi-touch capacitive touchscreen, a rear touchpad, two analog joysticks, and front and shoulder push-button input, and supports Bluetooth and Wi-Fi as standard while a variant model was sold with an additional 3G modem. The Vita features a quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore CPU and a quad-core SGX543MP GPU. The PS Vita 2000 series, a revised version of the system, was released across 2013 and 2014. It has all of the same features with a slightly smaller size, extended battery life, and an LCD panel instead of an OLED. Sony released the PlayStation TV, a short-lived, re-purposed version of the Vita that uses a television screen like a home video game console, discontinued at the end of 2015.
The Vita's design was intended to meld the experience of big-budget, dedicated video game platforms with the then up-and-coming trend of mobile gaming as seen on smart phones and tablets. However, in the year after the device's successful launch, sales of the hardware and its bigger budget games stalled, threatening to end its lifespan. A concentrated effort to attract smaller independent developers in the West, combined with strong support from mid-level Japanese companies, helped keep the platform afloat. Though this led to less diversity in its game library, it strengthened support in JRPGs, visual novels, and Western-developed indie games. This built moderate sales in Japan and a smaller yet passionate userbase in the West. Though Sony has not released exact sales figures, estimates are around 15 to 16 million units. In the platform's later years, Sony promoted the PlayStation Vita's ability to work in conjunction with its other gaming products, such as Remote Play of PlayStation 4 games, similar to the Wii U's function of Off-TV Play. The platform stalled in 2017 upon the release of the Nintendo Switch, and was completely discontinued in 2019. The system is regarded as a commercial failure in the video game industry, and was significantly outsold by the Nintendo 3DS. No direct successor was released by Sony, though in 2023, a similar remote play accessory, the PlayStation Portal, was released for the PlayStation 5.
