Although it was never the success that Sony had hoped, the PS Vita had some excellent indie games and the ability to stream from a PS4 was an intriguing facet.

Despite this, it looks like Sony is officially giving up the ghost on the PS Vita and is discontinuing production from 2019 onwards. In an interview with Famitsu, Sony Interactive Entertainment senior vice president Hiroyuki Oda confirmed that the portable gaming console has officially reached its end of life and will not be shipped from next year on, leaving the Nintendo Switch the only contender left on the market.

Sony and Nintendo have gone head-to-head in portable handheld gaming for fifteen years now, but with Sony bowing out of the market, Nintendo now stands alone. Launched in 2011, the PS Vita started off with 25 games in Western markets and sold over 200,000 units on its first month of release in the US. The Vita was, however, nowhere near as successful as the PS4 and even with the addition of Remote Play for it, sales never fully recovered.

In 2015, Sony made it clear that no successor to the PS Vita was being developed as the dominance of mobile gaming - as in, games on your phone - was too much to beat. Throw in the runaway success of the likes of 'Pokemon GO' and 'Super Mario Run' - both Nintendo-related titles - in the mobile gaming circuit, and the PS Vita's days were numbered.

Throw in the fact that mobile and handheld gaming is a notoriously fickle marketplace, and you can see why the Vita will sadly be no more from 2019.