I'd love for them to give it another shot, but I don't see them bothering at this point. Maybe a vita pro? Sadly, I think that's wishful thinking.
I pitched that for fun last year and got laughed off GAF, but I still stand by it. We can ask the question of whether making more Vitas makes sense or not at all, but according to this article, Sony seems to think so, so then the question in my mind becomes: Why continue to make an underpowered PlayStation Vita when you can make the games it current run a little peppier and prettier by upping the specs?
(Granted, I do not have any insight into the tech and whether a stronger GPU or more RAM could be beneficial given this architecture the way it does on PS4 Pro. Also, there would be cost in adjusting the manufacturing, so it would have to be a successful new product, and Vita means life, not success...)
A new handheld would be an extreme challenge to market in these conditions, so until there's a PS4 Portable, there's nothing new on the horizon.
In the meantime, Vita Pro -- sell the system you're already selling with more power to run the games it's already running. Sony is at this point probably paying nearly as much for 512 MB RAM, 128 MB of VRAM, and an iPad 2 chip that they'd pay for something less ancient. A PS Vita Pro could conceivably better run games like DQ World Builder, Ys, Akiba's Beat, Nights of Azure 2, the next Ateliers, whatever Neptunia ... uh, I guess Gun Gun Pixies, all of that stuff that'll be made one way or another, give them a version of the platform that makes these games easier to talk about and share. It's an aging platform, but it's not an obsolete or unsupportable platform, so I'd be super happy if they found a way to give it a boost.
...And, uh, ditch those Vita Memory Cards while you're at it?
Is that why they're not developing any games for it?
Sony's Third Party relationship mining has continued to pay off, as has making sure Unity supports the platform. So while I would
love to be playing a Horizon companion game on Vita right about now, there has been strategy that has worked (to a certain degree) that continued investment in new software development or porting to Vita would have been virtually hopeless for.
It is a bad sign to consumers that Sony isn't producing titles for its own platform, that'd be the key reason to back it still. The software itself was a sinkhole for Sony. (I'm bummed that the porting efforts pretty much trailed off, we got some pretty good Flower and Dead Nation and other Vita games out of it (but I'm guessing it was mostly previous PS buyers who got them and that new Vita buyers didn't see those old games new to Vita as attractive anyway, plus cross-porting even small-scale PS4 titles will be more and more challenging as new technologies take over.) On the Vita 1st Party front, it's damned if you do, damned if you don't.
if that was a hudsucker proxy reference, it was very fucking clever haha
"Sure, sure -- even a blind man could tell you that there'll be an enormous demand for this, uh ... this ..... Congratulations, kid, you've outdone yourself. You've reinvented the wheel!"