Well it depends on how much money it is making/losing for Sony. It is easy for us to sit here and say Sony should keep the Vita going, but at the end of the day, if the console is a big enough money loser for Sony, you can bet they will not hesitate to pull the plug on the thing. Especially in this tough economy, and with all the money they have reportedly lost already. Is it likely? I wouldn't think so. But don't rule anything out.. I don't think Sony has that emotional attachment to its devices like some of its fans seem to have.

I personally think it would be a smarter move for Sony to just ditch the full on gaming handheld and put all their handheld gaming efforts into the Ericsson, and sort of go the Apple route as a hybrid gaming, multimedia device, since they are a multimedia company anyway and the "all in one machine" is sort of their M.O. From there, focus mainly on the digital micro games similar to the Iphone and make pure profit that way with minimal losses, with maybe some occasional larger games to appease the core gamer. I think the type of games Sony and its third parties make don't serve the handheld medium that well. They seem to be meant for bigger screens and longer sit downs. The Vita seems to be caught between the DS/3DS model of pure, fleshed out gaming, and the Iphone/Smartphone model of multimedia and digital smaller games. I think they need to pick a road and stick to it.

The Vita could certainly turn into another PSP/PS3, where it sputters out the gate and picks up momentum with a stockpile of strong games, or it could end up like the Wonderswan. We just don't know. But based on what we have now, the Vita, a new console, is currently being outsold by the Wii, a 5 1/2 year console with almost no games of note being released. It is also floundering in Japan, which was its predecessor's bread and butter.

and how many million sellers did the 3DS have 2months after its intinational release? Zelda, street fighter and nintendogs all eventuall sold over a m, sales are strongly tied to the size of a userbase, so its not a case of tehm being too console like. Its not about good "portable" games,  its about big titles. Mario Kart and super mario replicated the sales of the mario kart wii and super mario galaxy, yet those were consoles game. Vita needs strong franchises, it doesn't have that yet.

Uncharted cannot sell on name alone, golden abyss is a far cry from the things that made the home console series iconic. i.e the spectacle and quality of story telling, its still managed 500k, thats impressive.The Vita needs titles like `Final Fantasy, Call of Duty, GTA to bring it success, the only 1s party titles i think will aid it are GT and LBP. Hopefull Final Fantasy type 0 wil find its way to the system, FFX and COD is already confirmed. BUt sony need to bring 3rd party support to e3

@OP:

Initial investments have already been made and games are under development. Ditching Vita would mean throwing all that money away without even trying to recover it. As long as losses on HW production be not excessive and SW profits exceed them, or be growing fast enough to do it in reasonable time, it makes sense to continue production, even more if HW costs will drop, and they always do, with time, in electronics.
Even if initial costs were excessive, ditching all would worsen things, as production makes HW costs drop, while SW becomes profitable after a given number of copies of each title is sold, stopping selling HW and SW would prevent even a partial return on investments.
If initial investments are little and production costs are huge, ditching a product can be a reasonable choice, but for products that have high initial costs and OTOH production costs that drop with time, once you paid initial investments, trying to sell the product is the only choice that can prevent from totally losing the investment.

No, they don't need to ditch it. They just need to cut the price to $150 and $199 and actually release some original exclusive PSVita games. Like 80% of the games they released are already on the PS3. They are just Mini-me's of it's big brother. I don't need to play Uncharted on a portable if there are already 3 Uncharted games on the PS3 that I haven't finished yet. Give me some new original titles for the PSVita and please drop the price. I'm not paying $250 for it unless it comes bundles with 4 games and some headphones.  Seriously, that's all they need to do and then sit back and watch them units fly off the shelves. Speaking of bundles, the PSVita really needs a good one. The PSVita is a decent handheld. I actually like the way it feels. I just want more games for it and a cheaper price. They may want to lower the price of their games as well. $50 is too high for a handheld game. There are better IOS games out there that are just $10-$15.

fO_O) is that Call of Duty Vita? 

Let's wait till we know the next wave of software before spelling misfortune on the system :)

I think this is just an PS3/360 screen placed on a Vita, not sure though.. but I don't think they'll reveal the biggest game like that!

BTW, did you bought Ciel no Surge yet? How's it? How's the buzz around it too?

Going to buy everything tomorrow (^o^)/

Vita 3G + Unit 13 (free) + Memory Card 4Go (free) (there's a special offer in France atm) + Gravity Daze + Ciel no Sourge (I hope they have it)

There's no big buzz about the game atm (well I can't really know since my favourite Japanese game magazine stopped publishing) but watch my blog in the following weeks I'll review it in full ;)

Why ditch it?

The original PSP took years and Monster Hunter success before it was anywhere near profitable. You have to give Monster Hunter a chance to arrive before declaring the system dead, as well as realize that the handheld market outside of Japan is second fiddle to home consoles so you can't expect much success based on NA or European sales at least until another major game arrives.

Because Sony loses money with Vita like they do with PS3 since years. But a six years ago Sony was a relatively healthy company so they could afford losing money with PS3 and waiting for a bright future were the PS3 sales rise and they earn money from the games. This future never happened, Sony is still losing money with PS3. Now Sony is an a serious financial crisis and on top of that is losing money with the PS3. Did they really want to have another money eater with Vita?

Sony should concentrate on PS4 and ditch the Vita.

They already lose 70 bucks on the psvita and will not profit off the system until 2013... and you suggest they price cut it by 100 dollars? they would never be able to recount those losses even adding software sales and market share