We know the PS Vita will no longer have its store taken offline this month, but what no one thought to ask was: Will new games continue to be added? If the claims of Vita developer Spooky Squid Games prove to be true, theirs — Russian Subway Dogs — is to be one the last come July 20.
Russian Subway Dogs was originally released in 2018 for PC. It managed a brief Kotaku mention when announced a couple of years before that, but proved a decent — if very strange — game. It was a single-screen arcade game inspired by the real lives of stray dogs living on the Moscow Metro. It’s about being one of those dogs, and just trying to stay alive. Now, another three years later, it’s coming to consoles. Except, not new ones. Instead it’s on Xbox One, PS4 and… PS Vita.
Developer Miguel Sternberg rushed to get the Vita port finished when he first heard the rumours the Sony stores were being switched off in 2021, and though that’s not happening, it seems July does mark the last chance to launch anything new.
“That date is the final day the Vita store will get updated,” Sternberg tells us in an email. “No new games after that!”
Rather than being purely a stunt, it seems Vita was always a platform Sternberg wanted to see the game played on. It’s his favourite handheld, and the port has been planned since 2015. “This is really a passion project,” he adds, “rather than a sound business decision.”
It obviously makes complete sense that no more new games will be coming to a platform that just came so close to losing its ability to buy games at all. It seems fitting, should this prove to be the case, that one of its last will be from a developer who cared so much about the handheld.
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