Yesterday, Sony stated that they no longer have plans to make handheld consoles. Game Informer interviewed, the President and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, Jim Ryan where he commented on the future of Sony handheld consoles, “PlayStation Vita was brilliant in many ways, and the actual gaming experience was great, but clearly it’s a business that we’re no longer in now.”
According to IGN, this feeling that handheld Sony consoles were coming to an end was held by Shuhei Yoshida back in 2015 when he stated that it was unlikely that there would be a successor to the PS Vita because “the climate is not healthy” crediting the popularity of mobile gaming as the reason.
Ken Kutaragi also apparently held this belief as Andrew House the former President & CEO of Sony Interactive stated in the Game Informer interview, “Ken Kutaragi was notably reluctant about getting into the portable- gaming market. I think there was a lot of arm-twisting that took place from folks like myself from the marketing and sales side of the organization, and one of the reasons I think was that he had genuinely foreseen the rise of smartphones before anyone had heard about the iPhone.” While the future of PlayStation handheld consoles is currently unknown, Jim Ryan’s statement makes it clear that the company doesn’t intend to make any new handheld consoles for now, instead choosing to focus on the next generation of the mainline console, the PlayStation 5.
Back in November, a patent was revealed for new PlayStation Controller. The new controller will have several features including adaptive triggers, allowing players to feel the resistance when they fire off a weapon in-game and haptic feedback support with programmable voice-coil actuators. The PlayStation 5 itself will be releasing in Holiday 2020 and will have a number of features including the ability to delete the single-player portion of a game if the game has a multiplayer campaign, updated speakers, ray-tracing acceleration, and backward compatibility.