Sony Interactive Entertainment president, Andrew House sees the handheld market as "limited" in the age of the smartphone, and has all but dismissed a successor to the PlayStation Vita to compete with Nintendo Switch

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Speaking to Bloomberg , House explained that "we have not seen [handheld gaming outside of Asia] as being a huge market opportunity."“The Vita experience was that outside of Japan and Asia, there was not a huge demand,” House continued. “The lifestyle shift toward the dominance of smartphones as the single key device that is always with you, was the determining factor.”The upshot is that House says there are no plans to take on Nintendo's Switch, which has boomed in its first year by combining handheld and home console play.In fact, House doesn't see Nintendo Switch as a handheld in the sense that Vita was, or as direct competition with Sony: “The Nintendo device is a hybrid device and that’s a different approach and strategy [...] The folks at Nintendo have their strategy and that’s great.”Bloomberg reports that House hasn't yet seen signs of Switch hurting PlayStations's sales, and that its release may actually done the opposite: “That draws me to the conclusion that they’ve really been additive to the business in the last year or so".While still receiving some support in Japan and other Asian markets, it seems as though Sony's experiments with handhelds may be over. As House puts it:"We remain focused around a highly connected gaming experience and also coupled with having a great range of other entertainment experiences so you can reach multiple people on the big screen in the household.”

Joe Skrebels is IGN's UK News Editor, and he's almost convinced that his Vita might have been worth it for Luftrausers alone. Follow him on Twitter