It has been reported by Sal Romano of Gematsu that Sony's official Japanese PlayStation website has been updated. Translation now reads that all models of PlayStation Vita and PlayStation TV are categorized under "Shipment Complete Model List", a probable indication that production of the little handheld and its microconsole counterpart have ceased.

This was to be expected. Last year Sony had announced plans to discontinue physical Vita games, and later they announced plans to discontinue the console all together. And yet they still updated the firmware to 3.70! It's as though they are trying to kill it and keep it on life support at the same time. The Vita never sold very well. It should have dominated the market, instead so many things went wrong - and Sony largely had themselves to blame.

Whereas the PSP and DS line of handhelds essentially established a new console war in the handheld market; the Vita entered a world where most portable gamers had switched over to smartphones and tablet computers - which were rapidly becoming on par with the games you could play on consoles. Sony also dug their own grave by doing many things wrong: loosing the video out functionality of that was a priority on later models of PSP; taking away physical PSP backwards compatibility, forcing players to rebuy the games digitally and thus turn away potential PSP owners who wanted to upgrade; and over reliance on proprietary memory cards that barely hold enough space. Had they at least used the same Memory Stick Duo cards that the PSP used, it wouldn't have been too big an issue, especially with inexpensive MicroSD to Memory Stick Duo adapters available. Instead the tried to control too much. They just didn't realize that proprietary memory cards died with the PlayStation 2 and its competitors.

Worse still, whereas Sony couldn't attract the support of either their established PSP community or its target adult audience, Nintendo jumped on that by releasing an inferior and cheaper product and over-catered to unsuspecting children. Seriously, other than Pokemon, Mario and Zelda, what games do you remember or even associate with the 3DS? Personally, I even bought a 3DS and I regretted my purchase! I only bought it for Driver Renegade and COP: The Recruit, the latter I couldn't even play because the controls were awful. There's absolutely nothing else on the 3DS that interests me.

When it was clear the Vita wasn't selling as a dedicated handheld game console, Sony focused all their marketing on the PS4 and primarily rebranded the Vita as PS4 Remote Play streaming device. Soon social networking and entertainment apps started disappearing from the Vita's store. Facebook is gone. YouTube is gone. Netflix is gone. The only entertainment app left seems to be Crunchy Roll. And now its possible to remote play on a mobile phone or even a PC. I personally prefer the Vita for remote play as it has all the buttons you need, especially with a trigger grip. But with the Remote Play app available on any PC or Android phone, a Vita is no longer a necessity for that purpose. It was only a matter of time before Sony gave up on it entirely, and as early as last week I noticed even some movies and TV shows delisted from the PlayStation Store.

If this is truly the end, the best we can hope for is that Sony gets its right next time. Assuming there is a next time, or if they intend to incorporate some form of portability with the PlayStation 5, they must learn from their mistakes. Specifically: give us physical backwards compatibility; include a HDMI out or at least some kind of audio video out functionality; let us use off the shelf SD cards instead of forcing us to buy proprietary memory cards. There is still some hope. It's rumoured PS5 will have backwards compatibility with disks from all past generations of PlayStation, we can only hope it will also support physical PSP and Vita games. People like to associate the Nintendo Switch with the hybrid concept, when really Sony was doing that long before them with the PSP or the Vita and PSTV or even remote play. If those diagrams from the patent office that leaked a few years ago are not intended for a new handheld, could they be intended for the PS5 as a hybrid console concept?

Ultimately hacking has proved what the Vita is truly capable of. The PSVimgTools Whitelist hack has demonstrated that the PSTV can run almost any Vita game to completion on any firmware, which only a select few suffering from compatibility issues. Xperi's PoC video streaming plugin has shown that Vita can stream those problem games to a PC running OSB Studio which in turn can be output to a television. And TheFloW's Adrenaline application has truly answered the cries of potential buyers who were PSP owners. Not only can you use Adrenaline to run legally purchased PSP and PSone Classics not normally supported by the Vita or PSTV, but if you have a PSP running custom firmware you can make ISO rips of your physical UMD collection and then copy those PSP games to your Vita without any need to rebuy them off the PlayStation Store. You can even install rips of PS1 disk! And of course, there are now inexpensive SD2Vita adapters which you can insert into the game cartridge slot and use as either external or main memory. So you can use an official Vita memory card purely for saves and DLC of cartridge games, and the SD2Vita for digital games.

If the Vita had a slot for microSD cards or even Memory Stick Duo cards, video out capabilities, and a drive for UMDs or at least an adapter to allow us to rip the UMDs to the console, hands down the Vita would have been the best selling handheld on the market. Alas it is what it is. But that does not mean we don't love it, nor does it mean we don't take solace in knowing these issues have mostly been rectified with homebrew hacks.

Thankfully the Vita's PlayStation Store isn't going anywhere... for now. And with SD2Vita cards being a viable option, not to mention a new hack for firmware 3.70 coming out later this year, there is no better time to splurge on digital releases of Vita games without any concern for limited storage. Not to mention the back catalog of PSP and PSone games available on the PlayStation Store. Some gamers are just getting into retro games, others are wishing to relive games from their childhoods or teenage years. And if you still have some of those physical games that were legally purchased back in the day, there's nothing stopping you from ripping them and playing them on the Vita. And of course, you can still use it for what Sony marketed the Vita as in its dying days - a PS3 and PS4 remote play streaming device.

While it is clear that Sony won't be answering our cries, I will be keeping this petition open. You've all made your cries heard and can continue to do so. And I in turn will continue to keep you all updated on the latest developments in the Vita homebrew community.

Thank you all. Vita means Life.