An ex-Sony employee has revealed that Sony’s soon-to-fully-die handheld that wasn’t able to keep up with the Nintendo 3DS in the West has had its fate sealed long before it was killed.

The anonymous former Sony employee held a Reddit Ask Me Anything, and the site’s moderators have confirmed their employment status, giving credibility to what the person wrote. The PlayStation Vita‘s PlayStation Store will die this summer a bit after the PlayStation 3‘s and PSP‘s respective PS Store facing the same fate.

„Sony views the [PlayStation] Vita as a failure. It missed pretty much every sales target they had and for a for-profit business that’s about as bad as it gets. They were content with it as a small stream of passive income, but when the firmware was broken they were nailing the coffin. It had some strong proponents internally, especially on the Japan side, but that just served as a ‘told you so’ in the culture wars Sony’s been not-so-quietly having for the past decade,” the user wrote. The PlayStation Vita was still a moderate success in Japan for years after it failed to gain attention in the West. The memory cards were meant to halt piracy, but it ended up turning many possible customers away.

We also learned that the PSP was planned to receive trophies, but after the catastrophic hack and the following downtime of the PlayStation Network in 2011: „After the nightmare that was the 2011 hack, Sony’s terrified of the word ‘hack’ or any potential network intrusions. Fun fact: the PSP was planned to have trophies until that firmware was broken and they dropped it like a hot potato,” the ex-Sony employee continued.

And one user asked why Sony seems to abandoned beloved IPs – the reasoning behind it was simple: „Sony is a business and they care first and foremost about where the money is, not where the sentiment is.”

Source: PSL