I read a few days ago on hackinformer that Target are liquidating their stock of PS Vitas, which initially didn’t feel like a big deal to me. But as I realized that black Friday is this week, this piece of news took a very different spin for me: retailers are getting rid of the PS Vita ahead of the biggest sales event of the year.

PS Vita is Dead: device nowhere to be found on retailers ads for black Friday

In other words, their are clearing their shelves of the laggards, in favor of much more attracting products. Yup, even at heavily discounted prices, major retailers don’t want the vita to pollute the rest of their videogame section on black Friday. A pretty heavy statement ahead of the biggest electronics sales week in the US.

Digging into the black Friday ads, it became clearer: the PS Vita is nowhere to be seen this year on major retailers’ catalogs. The statement is true for both games and systems. Of course, the living room devices (PS4, Xbox One, and PC) always see the bulk of advertising as opposed to handheld consoles, but the 3DS still gets its share of deals this year: Nintendo introduced a “black Friday” model that will sell for $99, not to mention the already announced deals on games such as Bravely Second or games in the Pokémon franchise.

Conversely, I have not found a single PS Vita deal, in any of the black Friday deals I have received.

Of course, all retailers in particular online giant Amazon will have flash deals, and I’m sure those will include PS Vita games. But this confirms that Sony have not been pushing the PS Vita at all this year to retailers, an indirect statement that the console is pretty much dead from their perspective.

For the homebrew community, this is arguably good news: this means that the fight against firmware updates might come to and end soon (although, let’s remember that the PSP got its last firmware update years after Sony had dropped support for the device), and more generally that the incentive to update to the latest firmware is greatly diminished, convincing more of the community to stay on firmware 3.60.

For those of you who do not have the golden 3.60 firmware or do not have a PS Vita yet, this means PS Vitas might get easy to find for cheap this year if more retailers get rid of their stock. A good opportunity to get yourself a 3.60 PS vita and enjoy homebrews.