It’s a platform that deserved a better fate, but Sony bumbled and fumbled it almost from the start. It’s actually a minor miracle that the thing lasted this long, despite Sony’s best efforts to kill it sooner.
It’s almost like Sony gave up after Nintendo countered the Vita announcement with a major 3DS price cut, which suddenly made the Vita prohibitively expensive— and that was the base price, not including another major Sony screw-up: the exorbitantly-priced memory cards that were required to make games work.
The advertising campaign for the Vita could be categorized somewhere between “weak” and “nonexistent”. Retailers, at least here in the US— couldn’t be bothered to make much room on shelves for Vita and its games. Even if they had, virtually no one was asking for it.
Sony never managed to get major software support for Vita. The few significant IP that made it to the platform were developed by lesser teams, and the lower quality was obvious. After Sony gave up trying, it was pivoted into an indie platform.
The tragedy here is that the Vita was a great piece of hardware. It could’ve fared better, had Sony tried a bit harder. Instead, it was a niche group of loyal consumers who kept it afloat.