January 5th 2020 archive

Why did you put down the Vita?

Because that’s what you did, Sony. You put it down like Susan the horse from Doctor Who.

When I found out that Sony was going to discontinue the Vita last year and that they were not going to manufacture any more games for it, I was extremely perplexed for a number of reasons, some personal.

Not only is the Vita a reigning household favorite for the simple fact that it is a mobile console, meaning that we can take it with us as needed — and as wanted — wherever we are, and wherever we want to go, but it was Sony’s most recent mobile console. And if they were going to discontinue it, Sony wouldn’t have a mobile console, meaning that the only game developer to have a mobile console… would be Nintendo, with the Nintendo Switch. This meant that Sony would be conceding the entire mobile console market to Nintendo. Was this really the most tactical thing for them to do when there was no word of a new mobile console even waiting in the wings? Not so much as a peep of anything new in development? Seriously, Sony?

We here at the Bub Club, as I like to put it, take our consoles seriously. We take our mobile consoles even more seriously. (And the fact that I call them mobile consoles pays homage to the fact that I am a Doctor Who fan, or a Whovian as some people like to put it. Sometimes I straight up call them mobiles. Sometimes I straight up call cell phones mobiles. That’s the overwhelmingly British lineage in me talking from across the pond, courtesy of Ancestry and 23andMe. I knew there was a reason that I liked the shows that I did as much as I did.) We don’t throw consoles away when they still function, and we replace parts and consoles when they don’t function to make them still function. We frequent pawn shops as needed, and we still have a functioning Nintendo 64 and Super Nintendo. Who says blowing into a cartridge isn’t fun for the whole family? I mean, I’m an asthmatic, so I have one of my kids do it for me, but I mean, my kids know what blowing into a cartridge is like because I’m a good parent and my goal is clearly raising them right here…

Frankly, though, I got a lot of enjoyment out of games that came out on the Vita, and Bub has enjoyed a lot of them as well. So for Sony to completely discontinue the Vita like this and take themselves out of the mobile console market is, at least to me, incredibly foolish. This concedes the whole mobile console market to Nintendo. Do they even care that this affects their bottom line and their revenue, or does it not bother them?