People please look at the sales. There is no reason Sony should keep this thing afloat. So my question is not only will this be it's last holiday but will Sony just ditch handheld technology and focus fully on consoles, just like back in the PS1/early PS2 era?

Not for Japan, but maybe for the rest of the world...

Probably not... I can see it chugging along for a couple more years just as long as its not costing Sony much money which, considering how little they support it, it's not

Possibly, thanks to no good games from Sony.

I mean, aren't they losing money from it? It would make sense to discontinue it

The problem has always been expensive memory cards. There's nothing wrong with the device itself. It's just way too expensive.

Sony as a couple of games the will probably come west next year. But unless the announce some more are being made id imagine the next year will most likely be the final year of real support from sony.

That will be Nintendos time to strike at the japanese market IMO, they need all the future vita games to be on 3DS/NextDS. Make sure they monopolise the market.

Apparently it's not even worth discounting on Black Friday

I can't see them keeping it afloat.

At this point they're not selling it at a loss, and knowing Sony and how they keep selling their systems long after most companies would give up, and known Sony hardware legs, I think they'll keep it going, continue to give it almost no support, and a couple years down the line it'll be at 12 million. Europe is supporting it just as much as Japan lately, so no reason to stop just yet. Even America isn't too far behind that at the moment, though that's just holiday sales kicking in. As for replacing it, yeah, I'm not sure if they will. If they do, they'll do what Nintendo is rumored to be planning on doing and have it fully integrated with the console, a console portable hybrid. They're already trying to make the Vita be that in a way for the PS4.