Well, it seems the sad story of the PlayStation TV is heading towards an ending, as Sony has revealed that the console, a home version of the PS Vita, is being discontinued in Japan. Sony’s official Japanese listing for the console and its various bundles says that the last shipments have been completed.
The PS TV was originally released in Japan in November of 2013, and then to North America in October of 2014. It failed to make any kind of impact, and the original selling price of $99.99 was dropped multiple times, to $39.99 after release, and then as low as $20 not long ago. One of the console’s biggest problems was that it was abe to play many of the PS Vita’s games, and it lacked other features such as Netflix to make people buy it.
The device did have a few benefits, though. You could stream your PS4 to it and play many games remotely – provided you had a pretty good Wi-Fi in your house. And some games, such as Persona 4 Golden, were much more enjoyable when put up on the big screen. But they just weren’t enough to get past consumers’ reluctance, and when even Sony seemed to abandon the device, the writing was on the wall.
In June of 2015, Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida admitted the device was not catching on with customers, and tried to explain why.
“It’s a hard concept to explain. You could say it’s a mini-console, it’s a video streaming device. If we say it’s a mini-console, like other mini-consoles, people expect a better device like PS4 or Xbox One. It’s short in that delivery.”
He also admitted that, while the PlayStation TV does many things, it doesn’t do any of them all that well. “When you say it’s a video streaming device, there are other devices with higher def video,” he said. “It has some unique things like remote play of PS4 games. It can do many things, but it’s not easy to say this one thing is extremely good. I think that’s the reason we were not able to convince people at the original price.”
That rather frank admission seemed to signal a quiet backing-away from the console by Sony, and the PS TV’s sales only suffered more. That led to a vicious cycle of sorts, where consumers were reluctant to buy a product that seemed like it was in its death-throes. The self-fulfilling prophecy was the final nail in the PS TV’s coffin.
No word yet on whether Sony plans to replace the PlayStation TV with some other project – we will keep you posted.