Sony: "Vita is still a viable platform"

Sony Interactive Entertainment America's president and CEO Shawn Layden has been talking about PlayStation Vita in the run up to E3. The system has sold around four million units since its launch in 2011, but success has largely evaded the handheld in Europe, with Layden confirming that it's mostly the Asian market that remains interested.

"Vita is still a viable platform," Layden told The Verge, "chiefly in the Japanese and Asian markets. We still have developers in Japan who are building for that platform. But it just didn't get over the hump in Europe and America. It's hard to know exactly why, but it didn't garner a large enough audience here for us to continue to build for it."

In many respects, the Vita was ahead of its time, as it looked to give players the chance to move their games between the console and the handheld, a trick that Nintendo has streamlined and made much success of with the Switch.