Sony has no titles in the pipeline for PlayStation Vita, says executive

Sony is leaving PlayStation Vita development to third parties, a top executive said, as the company focuses its efforts to the PlayStation 4.

Masayasu Ito, a senior vice president with the company, told the Japanese-language site 4Gamer that "first-party studios have no titles in development for PS Vita," adding that Sony Computer Entertainment's strategy now is "to focus on PS4." (That's according to a translation by the DualShockers.)

If that literally is the case, that would spell an end to the handheld run for the Sony-developed MLB The Show series after 10 years. We have asked a Sony Computer Entertainment America rep for clarification, though. It's possible Ito may have meant new titles in development, considering The Show an ongoing iterative series, or that he misspoke.

MLB The Show has published on PlayStation Vita since 2012 (and on PSP since the first MLB The Show in 2006). Some side modes of play and presentation elements in the console version are absent from the portable edition. Players have been able to transfer their career saves to the cloud to continue them from one device to the next, a feature that led to the sports series being the first to allow save files to be ported forward to future editions of the game.

Though Sony's Shuhei Yoshida, the chief of studios worldwide, recently said that "the climate is not healthy" for a successor device to the Vita, third party development remains robust enough to support a launch of new color options for the device, Ito said. Ito also pointed to the launch of Minecraft: PS Vita Edition about a year ago as giving the handheld "a boost."

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