The only thing I can think of is that they were refocusing their games division around the PS4 to reclaim their space in the home console area after the disaster that the PS3 was initially taking advantage of the initial failure of the Xbox One.
PS Vita and their owners were just a collateral Sony was absolutely willing to sacrifice.
Just feel like I should at least add two more things here:
Storing information do their customers as plaintext data, then getting hacked and losing all that information (infamous PSN hack);
Releasing a portable console that cost between 250 and 300€, promising support for it then 2 years in, give up on it, never officially tell customers, but have one of your higher execs tell the press said console is a great “accessory” for the PS4.
This is why I don’t personally buy Sony hardware.
While I’m absolutely not vocal about it as you are, I’d say almost 100% of what you feel is shared by myself too. I even bought two pockets (one for me and one for someone else) and we’ve been amazingly disappointed at the progress of updates on it. Yes they created the OpenFPGA thing, but that was obviously to not get left behind by new emerging platforms like the MisterFPGA and (to a less extent) the Steam Deck.
And will all things on the Internet, they developed a fan base that is mostly pretty defensive about them because they believe if Analogue died tomorrow, all of a sudden this type of project would stop existing (I feel anyhow).
I started looking differently at Analogue after mGBA’s developer endrift told their story about their experience with them (worth a read)
Part of me is very interest in adding this to my retro setup.
The other part of me knows that I bought the Analogue Pocket and the updates and communication from Analogue are really bad (despite all the device can do) which honestly is a no-no when you pay as much as you do for their stuff
It’s been down a lot for me lately. I basically only use it as a nextcloud pointer for large file uploads since cloudflare free has a 100MB limit and the Nextcloud desktop app lacks chunk-uploads. Which are ironically only present in the iOS client.
I believe I read Microsoft was working on something similar but it was definitely for mobile games. So I think that’s the idea. Not 100% sure tho
Doing the work, brother. Thank you.