Time for today's depressing Vita news.  This time, courtesy of an ex-member of Sony Bend.

tl;dr version - yes, the reason they've been quiet for so long is because they had a load of Vita stuff cancelled.

Their first project:

It was going to be another Uncharted game but naughty dog was worried about franchise burnout with so many games coming out so close together, so they nixed it. We spent like a whole year dicking around with different ideas and pitches after that before I left the studio. We started and threw away so many demos during that year.

Sony really wanted another Uncharted from us and tried to convince Naughty Dog to let us do it. They wanted more content for Vita.

Their subsequent projects:

And we did make an infamous pitch at one point, too. I think that was the first pitch and demo we made after the uncharted project was canned. The infamous game would have been a vita title too.

We did a couple new IP pitches. One was steampunk but that didn’t make it very far. There was a really awesome futuristic sci if one that I really liked. We had an amazing future scifi city and a character that could run around and scale buildings with these jet boots, and it was awesome. We had a lot of assets done for that demo when it was canned. I was really bummed when that one got binned.

And what happened to them after that:

I left the studio about 2 years ago and that was when they were making the switch to Unreal 4 and PS4

So basically they tried a load of Vita stuff and had it thrown out, so switched to PS4 to survive (pretty much).