While Nintendo Co Ltd may have been toppled from its long-held perch as the king of console gaming, the Japanese game maker still dominates the handheld market thanks to the Nintendo 3DS, which as of June had sold over 233 million units. For roughly the last decade, Nintendo’s main competitor in the handheld space has been Sony Corp, but neither the PlayStation Portable (PSP) nor the more recent PS Vita achieved anywhere near the success of Nintendo’s devices.

During a Q&A session onstage at last week’s EGX event in England, Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida made it clear that a PS Vita 2 is probably not on the horizon, but it is not competition with Nintendo that Sony is worried about: it’s mobile.

“That’s a tough question,” Yoshida told a fan who asked about the prospect of a PS Vita 2. “Because people have mobile phones, and it’s so easy to just play games on smartphones, and most games on smartphones are free.”

“Myself, I’m a huge fan of PS Vita,” he continued. “We worked really, really hard to design every aspect of PS Vita, and there are lots of people like yourself that love playing games on PS Vita. Touch-based games are fun, and there are many games that are really well-designed, but having sticks and buttons makes things totally different. So I hope, like many of you, that this culture of playing portable games continues, but the climate is not healthy for now because of the huge dominance of mobile gaming.”

Despite the continued success of the 3DS, Nintendo is also seemingly concerned with competition from mobile, and the company announced earlier this year that it would be releasing its first games for smartphones in the near future, with five titles expected to released for mobile by 2017. “We are aiming to make [mobile] one of the pillars of Nintendo’s revenue structure,” former Nintendo President Satoru Iwata said at the time.

There is currently no word on future plans for PlayStation to follow suit with more mobile games, but with the PlayStation 4 currently leading the market in consoles, Sony can likely afford to focus its attention elsewhere for now.

You can watch Yoshida’s full Q&A session from EGX below:

Photo by Doug Kline