December 11, 2012 | By Christian Nutt
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More: Console/PC, Social/Online, Smartphone/Tablet, Indie, Programming, Art, Audio, Design, Production, Business/Marketing, Exclusive
Gamasutra features director Christian Nutt continues Gamasutra's annual year-end roundups series by looking back at biggest disappointments of 2012.
This was a hard list to write, for a lot of reasons. Of course, I have my own personal disappointments -- where the hell is the U.S. version of Bravely Default? -- but they don't necessarily stop the industry in its tracks.
There's also something unpalatable about reflecting on disappointment. One's mind wants to bounce over the surface of the emotion, like a rock skipping on a pond, without diving in. And trying to think back and remember what was disappointing is an odd experience. Can you?
Some things, though, simply stood out to me, and once I gave in to the feeling, it was easy to come up with a list of letdowns.Star Wars: The Old RepublicAlmost a year ago, Star Wars: The Old Republic launched amidst tremendous fanfare and confident projections from publisher Electronic Arts about its commercial potential. Astute observers had noted signs of trouble for years; many had questioned whether or not BioWare's strength in single player storytelling would translate to an MMO; whether too much money was being spent on the game's development; whether the subscription model still worked, and other concerns.
Well, things went just about as badly as they could have, in the end. Yes, the initial sell-through was strong, but that was the last good news about the game. The Old Republic's design was panned as uninventive; the player population dwindled precipitously when subscribers reached the end of the game's scripted content; by the middle of the year, EA had already announced plans to take the MMO free-to-play to shore up its sagging server populations. For what's reputedly the most expensive game ever developed, this is not a good outcome.PlayStation VitaThe PlayStation Vita is the most capable dedicated handheld gaming device ever launched -- and apparently the most undesirable. While Sony made sure that the launch was supported with an outing from the Uncharted series and a host of other games across various genres, software support has since been anemic the world over, and sales of both hardware and games have followed in kind.
Japanese gamers are content to stick with the PSP, which continues to be the favorite system of die-hards, or migrate to Nintendo's 3DS, which has become a resounding success in that territory over the past year. Western gamers are essentially avoiding the system altogether. Insider reports of the sales of what should have been the system's flagship Western holiday title, Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified, are commensurate with its Metacritic score (31, as of this writing.)
The top game for the system -- in both Japan and the U.S. -- is Persona 4: Golden, a port of a four year old PlayStation 2 game. That is a sad condemnation of the system, quality of the game aside, and an indication that Sony never understood its audience of hardcore early adopters, widely missing the mark with its software lineup.
No matter how problematic it may be this lineup, apparently, is something Sony seems to -- for some reason -- have little interest in anymore. E3, Gamescom, and Tokyo Game Show went by with a single outstanding title revealed -- Media Molecule's Tearaway, which will be a very lonely game indeed.
With Call of Duty all but assuredly a failure, the Vita's outlook for 2013 is extremely muted. What Western publisher will touch a system that Call of Duty can't save? With Japan ignoring the system -- it has no announced Final Fantasy titles, a first for a Sony system -- what will those Persona 4 Golden fans move on to? E3We've already written about the turning point this year's E3 was for Gamasutra's staff, among others. I won't recapitulate that here. But the show failed on other levels, too.
E3 feels dated. The show, originally launched in 1995, has essentially remained unchanged -- except for two years of flirtations with new formats in 2007 and 2008 which were, if anything, worse.
Think back to those years. The show's management, recognizing that it had become a ridiculous spectacle, hideously expensive and inefficient, scaled back wildly to restrict the expo to the press and those who had real business to do.
Fast forward to 2012, and the show is just as huge and loud and tacky as ever it was; it's just as choked with retail employees and others who have no actual business to conduct at the event. In fact, more games than ever are now exclusively behind closed doors, a tacit acknowledgment of how many unwanted civvies are getting in -- which is also reflected in how all the booths have been completely reduced to tacky spectacles, with a focus on booth babes, aliens, cars, celebrities, and other distractions.
But also look at the swelling attendance of Gamescom and Tokyo Game Show, which let in the masses in an honest way -- and manage to separate the business and public aspects of the show very effectively. Look at PAX, which is a wholehearted celebration of games for gamers, with the community gathering to enjoy its hobby together. E3 is simply a showcase for the biggest, loudest, most crass and most powerful forces in the core game business, and without indies and other players outside of the triple-A console space, doesn't represent the industry as it really is.
Where's the vibrancy of the game industry we know and love? Elsewhere, it seems.Steam GreenlightThe pitch was fantastic: Indies having trouble? No problem. We don't have the time to deal with this problem internally, so we'll crowdsource a solution. The result, though, was severely problematic at launch, and still isn't quite right.
The original problem with the system -- the fact that Steam users could downvote games they weren't interested in, which lead to lots of partisan bashing of innocent titles -- was quickly fixed. But good games by serious indie developers, like Incredipede, are getting overlooked in favor of irredeemable trash like Postal 2. It has quickly devolved into a popularity contest, and what's popular is -- turns out -- not always great.
Now, games that are very far from release are getting into the voting, confusing its purpose. Is it meant to be a gateway for new games, or a way for the Steam community to vote on what it thinks might be interesting?
There's no doubt that Greenlight will become a valuable part of Steam, but it hasn't gotten there yet, leaving many of the people it was devised to help wanting more.It's Mega Man's 25th Birthday and Nobody CameWhen Keiji Inafune, Capcom's head of R&D, stepped down a couple of years ago, inside sources say that the franchise he created -- which was once the flagship property of the company he'd worked for since the 1980s -- was vanished. Games in development, both announced and unannounced, were unceremoniously killed. Mega Man was put on ice.
But 1987 was the year Mega Man was born, and you would have expected some meaningful acknowledgment of this from the company. Few publishers have vibrant, appealing franchises that date back to the NES days -- or ones so ripe for a reimagining, ones with such a passionate fan base.
Not so for Mega Man. So far we've seen the release of the (so far) Japan-only Rockman Xover, a social RPG for phones -- tenuously connected the anniversary at best -- and Street Fighter x Mega Man, a fan-made hack given legitimacy by Capcom USA's marketing department, desperate to stamp the otherwise unused Mega Man 25th Anniversary logo on something this year.
This is a sad testament to how politics can actually kill a beloved character; how we, as an industry, still suck at celebrating our past; and how potentially powerful franchises are left on the vine in the search for the next big thing.
More Gamasutra 2012 roundups:
The 5 trends that defined the game industry in 2012
The 5 events that shook the video game industry in 2012
The 5 most significant video game controversies in 2012
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Beyond that, they closed down several studios after shipping Vita games.
And worse, one company that has actually expressed interest in putting their game on the Vita, if Sony ports it (or pays to have it ported), Sony has completely ignored. Gearbox and Borderlands 2. Borderlands 2 could be a killer app on the Vita, or at least something big, but Sony just doesn't want to help.
If Sony isn't going to support their own device, who do they think will? As a Vita owner, I have a lot of regret. Even Playstation Mobile seems to be very poorly handled.
As a gamer and not a developer, I find it mind blowing that devs won't put a game on a system because they can't use ALL of the tech found on a particular device. This is something that players, PLAYERS, have been complaining about forever---be it the Wii. PS3, 360, 3DS, Vita, Move, Kinect, ....developers find the NEED to shoehorn shitty functions into tech just because they can, not because it helps the game but because it is offered. Why not just use the the tech you want to use and leave the rest to be used on another game that has a need for it? GB could have ported Borderlands 2 to the WiiU and just used the classic controller pro as the default. If you can't find a compelling reason to use all of the tech, then don't, use what you want or need.
I can't speak for Gearbox, but I'm betting it's not that they can't use all the tech. Their thought process is probably more along the lines of: "How do we use this new tech to make this version so mindblowing that people pick it up despite having already acquired it for another system?" The people who were excited to pick up Borderlands 2 already did. In September. Before the Wii U launched. And there's costs associated with the new hardware. Dev kits. Time spent porting the tech over to the new system. Optimizing for the system. Etc.
Porting a two month old FPS to a new console with limited install base (~500,000 in the US last I heard) isn't a very appetizing prospect unless you can do something so amazing with it that people will be driven to pick up a second copy, or trade in their older one to get the new version.
I'm not saying it wouldn't be cool. I'm saying I can understand (what I believe is) their thought process: if we can't make it so amazing that it feels like a dramatic improvement over what was shipped already on 360/PS3/PC, it's not worth it.
I'd put money on Borderlands 3 appearing on the WiiU at launch though. By then the system will be established, someone else will have done the heavy lifting of getting Unreal over to the WiiU, and they will be able to launch it simultaneously with the other platforms (so customers will have a choice that doesn't involve waiting for two months to get the game).
The problem is they ultimately care about pushing their hardware, not the end user experience - or their marketplace, as in steam. Which is why including things like achievements are not optional, and ruin the experience on consoles. It's a 'branding' opportunity for these guys.
"as a developer, the decision to use features is almost never up to the software developer. Hardware manufacturers require you use as much of their tech as possible, or they won't accept your title. Especially for small or midsize shops, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo are simply awful to work with."
Thanks for passing this on. I was unaware of this stipulation of hardware manufacturers. It's really a shame because my guess is that this was implemented on the two FPS on the Vita,(CoD and Resistance), which really killed the games(don't know personally--watched and read reviews) I would have been more interested in resistance but because they added in a bunch of useless touch screen motions, it make the game unnecessarily complex on a formula that has been tested time and time again. Anywho. Thanks!
PS--Achievements and Trophies are the worst things that have happened to gaming IMO. I wish there was a way to turn them off(at least on PS3--don't own a 360)
http://www.1up.com/features/top-psp-vita-games-2012?pager.offset=1
The FFT0 Vita port was effectively axed at the same time as the English release, from what I heard.
The Tales series is just as popular, if not more so, as Final Fantasy in Japan (They've already got two reimaginings of Tales mothership titles on Vita). On top of that, Phantasy Star Online 2 also went into beta recently for the Vita. I'm just irked that Namco Bandai probably missed their chance to localize Tales of Innocence R, a game I'd been looking forward to since the original DS game was announced. Seriously, people aren't giving the Vita enough time.
You mean time until Monster Hunter 4 for the 3DS ships in Japan, because then, the japanese market will be lost forever.
In Japan the Vita tracks behind the Dreamcast and honestly, I don't see the system reach the 10 million units worldwide, the Dreamcast sold, before Sega pulled the plug.
No.
FF13 sold a million *launch day*. FF13-2 was the best selling home console game in Japan in 2011 with just under a million copies. FF12 sold almost two million launch week.
Tales of Graces (including f) sold something like half a million total. Tales of Xilia sold about 800k and Namco said that was the most anything in the series has sold since 2002. That's comparable to FFT0, a handheld-exclusive secondary title in the FF series.
Seriously though, I remember people saying they wanted E3 to be small so it shrank. Then they all got on podcasts like, "E3 is small, it's dead. Game over, man." Now it's big again and the same folk are like, "E3 is big, it's dead. Game over, man." Seems like people just like saying E3 is dead, regardless of what reality might be. Kinda reminds me of how people always say TGS is on a quick death... despite reality being that attendance is increasing year over year.
Also, Steam Greenlight was always supposed to be a system where people vote for what they want to see on Steam and the most popular titles get green lit, right? I don't understand the big shock that it turned out to be exactly that.
Give me something that feels like Guild Wars, not this generic WoW wanna-be.
The bashing was a real thing though. While the down vote button didn't actually harm the games progress to approval, the comments sections of several games were besieged by jerks of all stripes as they dumped insults and negative comments on games that they felt deserved it.
Yeah, I also read the wailing editorials about the trashy Greenlight comments section as well. Except that, much like the concept of serial downvoting, juvenile comments have never been a real problem either.
All devs with projects on Greenlight have always had the ability to delete comments at will, for any reason they like. There isn't even a placeholder that remains (like Youtube's "comment removed" notice); they simply vanish from the page entirely. This allows the devs to leave nothing but fawning praise in the comments section if they so wish, and many of them do.
With Old Republic, I think that just shows that the large scale subscription based MMO is dead. WoW was the last of its kind. Sure smaller more indie style MMOs will be able to survive, but nothing that is based on the idea of 10s of millions of people playing and paying each month.
You can't say that, since you have no reliable polling data. Over reach.
Such a minority they spent time and money changing the ending. You can call them a minority, but it doesn't mean they are.
You have more faith than me if you think EA would ok funding for such changes to a shipped game for a minority.
Fair enough.
Here are some other numbers: no Bioware game that has telemetry has ever had the majority of the players finish. This is true at least since DA:O, the devs have confirmed it repeatedly on the boards. I could as easily say that the fact that most people didn't finish the game means they didn't like it enough to bother finishing it, so we now know that more than half of people didn't like the game (that wouldn't be true, but it's coherent.)
But the # of people on the petition can't be taken straight up. Anyone who has ever run cusomer service or sales will tell you that most people who are unhappy don't say anything about it. They just move on. The rule of thumb in most businesses is 10:1. For every person who complains, 9 other people are unhappy.
Further, making your most vocal and passionate fans/customers, who will badmouth you to the world from then on, unhappy, is really really bad business.
And, while it's not for the current conversation, I took some time to read EAs annual statements. They are making a lot of really basic business mistakes.
When is the "Best things of 2012" coming? :)
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/182954/The_5_trends_that_define d_the_game_ind
ustry_in_2012.php#.UMdEaJPjmn8
But really, all these could be seen as good if you are willing to learn a lesson from them.
Was 2012 all bad? Don't we have any Good / Positive things? ( Trends don't really say whether their positive or negative of course)..
But I'm sure the final top ten is going to be as awesome and surprising as always.
My list would include at least the Rise and dominance of Minecraft, and what this could mean for the future, both for game development, as for publishing.
I personally started playing this year, and I found it to be an amazing experience. In the weeks before Black Ops 2 was released, Minecraft was even the most played game on Xbox Live, more then Fifa, Modern Warfare 3, and a whole slew of other AAA games.. Now that's what I call a major positive achievement :)
Another positive experience for me is DayZ. How a mod of a not too popular game gained so much popularity that they are now working on a standalone. But, much more important then the financial success (at least to me), is it's Unique gameplay.
The way people interact with each other. The impact killing and dying has in the game. The folklore surrounding it, even the rise of hero's like Dr Wasteland, who like his name already says, goes around healing people in a game that's all about being suspicious of any player to a point of paranoia, or Villains like the black Widow. The interaction between players in DayZ is truly a very informative sociological study, much more then any "walled-off" MMO has ever been able to come close to.
I could go on, but I think I might just wright a blog about it after all.. :P
Cant wait to read what positive points Gamasutra's staff is going to come up with
I disagree that our roundups have been all negative. But in any case, don't worry--we're saving the outright celebrating of our favorite games and developers for later this month.
Ninja Gaiden 3
Street Fighter X Tekken (where more time at character select is spent cycling through hundreds of gems instead of actually choosing your character, as seen during the finals last weekend).
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/171041/Opinion_The_many_reasons _Street_Fighte
r_X_Tekken_sold_less_than_expected.php
SWTOR won "Best Online Game Design" at the GDC Online awards. As well as best tech, best visuals, and best new online game.
Hmm.
Isn't the decision based on community voting? Not sure if that counts as them getting it right.
It's a little strange to see pieces like this one or ones bashing Zynga then see that the awards Gamasutra promotes are largely centered around SWTOR and Zynga games.
Seems worthy of explicit examination or at least acknowledgement.
I was talking about the VGA's as a whole, I'm not a big fan of corporate circle-jerk events, and the VGA's feels and looks like one of the worst :)
I'm not so sure. I know no one has managed to do it (though Rift has come close) but I'm not sure it can't be done. I would have hired some people who used to work on soap operas and tried to streamline the tools/process so I could have new story coming out every 6 weeks, max. All the VO/Writing can definitely be done fast enough, TV does it all the time. It can be done. The question is the levels/art/etc...
Maybe it can't yet be done, but it is what HAD to be done to make SWTOR work. Almost everyone I knew who quit loved the story and left when it became clear they weren't getting any more for months. Story is Bioware's core competency, they spent most of their money on it, then they expected people to stick around when it ran out?
The job was to figure out how to pipeline enough story. If they couldn't do that, they couldn't make the game work, especially since the mechanics were almost pure WOW (and please, no one tell me otherwise, I played WOW for years.)
I firmly believe that sort of idea just doesn't make sense. But that's just me.
Servers are filling back up, new content is being released regularly now, and the gameplay mechanics have stabilized. The game doesn't feature the best aspects of every MMO ever made (like some were foolishly expecting) but then no MMO ever will. At least not until back offices and rendering farms are plugged right into the backbone and client systems are all HAL9000s.
Perfect? No way. Playable? Absolutely. Enough to sustain long term viability? Who knows. The game has its feet back underneath it, so I wouldn't bet against it. But in the same breath I also understand that no MMO will ever hit - let alone sustain - 10 million active subscribers again. If that's what it will take for the market outside of WoW to survive then it's dead already, and we might as well pound on Blizzard to release a World of Starcraft.
Second post, as the first one had URLs in it and may have been caught in the spam trap. Look on RockPaperShotgun, December 12th, for 'The spy who went into the cold' or Slashdot's games section, December 7th, both stories related to gamespy.
Disclaimer: I'm hardly an uninterested 3rd party here. I've been patching Battlezone 2 in my spare time (with permission) since 2000, and we were one of the first games to get shut off from Gamespy, months ago. It's only when bigger titles get the axe that this even makes it to major sites like RPS or Slashdot.
While this was a great article, I found this statement a little surprising. I thought the game industry had the opposite problem – milking old franchises until they were dry. I guess you can only milk so many of them at once.
Gamers are waiting for the big games to come to support good hardware..
Game makers are waiting for gamers to buy the system first for a decent user base...
It's just silly, Sony's WWS do need to step there game up, but gamers need to support things early on as well so 3rd parties get involved more quickly.
I personally think Sony underestimated their targets audience wallet, pocket size (not wanting to carry around more then 1 or 2 devices), and competion in that market from smartphones & tablets. Because the market is so split-up, I don't think that Big Titles could entice a large mount of customers; the biggest & best mobile games are already available for android & iOS, and the big console titles already on console.
I hate to say this, but I'm beginning to think that if/when one of the big three fails after the next generation, Playstation has the biggest chance. Their poor Vita sales are one thing, but if they fail to see the PS3's shortcomings, and incorporate them in the PS4, it'll only weaken their position..
Cost of entry being the biggest factor. $299(3G) for a handheld is hard as hell to swallow. Then you get to pick up a Sony branded proprietary memory card. $100 bucks for 32GB? Really? So, after those two things, plus a game, you are looking at around $400-450 bucks just to get started.
Next, is the game selection. Considering that the library consists of mostly rehashed and remakes of games people have already played, this is not going to make people buy an expensive handheld like this. There are maybe 2-3 original games on the console I'm excited about. Considering how support is waning already, there isn't enough on the horizon to warrant a $400 purchase.
Last off, we have the Sony PSP UMD to Vita transfer. Sony provided a service to convert your old PSP UMDs to digital so they would work on the Vita. This was a free service provided by Sony. A good way to give people an easy way to move over to a Vita and let your old PSP go. Great right? Not if you don't live in Japan. This service was never available to the rest of us. What a great way to show loyalty to the rest of the world. If Sony doesn't care about me enough to provide these services, why should I care about Sony?
Overall, the handheld seems on point. I played Gravity Rush at a store and it is a nice piece of tech. I might pick one up after a major price drop, but not before at this point. Sony still has this high and mighty stance of thinking that people will buy their overpriced gadgets just because it says Sony.
Without sales, the Vita at Amazon for 4 through 32 gig units are $250 - $276 - $298 - $331 (You can get the 4 gig card for free with $250 bundles as well, along with a game.)
An iPad would cost $500 for 16 gigs, $600 for 32 gigs, and $700 for 64 gigs. Talk about expensive memory upgrades... It's only $33 more for the Vita to go from 16 to 32 gigs, but $100 more for Apple products to do the same jump.
Christian Nutt: The Vita version of VLR is far superior to the 3DS version though. Also, when I play games on my 3DSXL, I end up wanting to chuck it out of the window because of how much it makes my hand cramp up with its overly stiff circle pad. It's the most uncomfortable portable system I've ever used, which is why it generally sits at home plugged into the charger, rather than being carried in my pocket. The PSP analog nub, for all its faults, was more usable than that monstrosity.
I always felt that Gamasutra was better then this kind of sensationalist stuff...
Now, can we stop with the negativeness and talk about what went well during 2012?
I picked mine up, on Amazon for $170 plus 2 free games...if not for that deal, I would've likely not have jumped on...With 3DS, it's just easier to get started day one. It's a better gift, a better package, easier on the wallet etc...
The one thing I'm hopeful for though, is that many articles like this were floating around on the web about PS3 after it's first year. MS has certainly made it's brand loud in the U.S, but world-wide, PS3 will likely be the number 2 console this generation when it was supposed to burn and die according to websites. Sony completely turned around PS3 with great software, and judging from there PR, seem to be confident to do the same with Vita.
I agree though, the biggest factor isn't lack of games, because there's actually a good amount of content or even the demographic, teenagers might be playing with smartphones, but gamers aren't occupied more than a few minutes with stuff like Angry Birds. It's that friggin price of entry. System+Memory stick+1 game is just too steep a price to get started.
I think if everyone could buy a vita like a did on black friday (Vita+4gb memory stick+AC:Liberation and Playstation all stars, +3 months of plus for $170) many would impulse buy the platform. Because it's a beautiful machine.
Overall though, it's just not a good vibe for websites to keep saying it's dead, Dreamcast was doing better, etc etc...3DS sucked at its $250 price-point as well...just let Sony do there thing, most of there WWS haven't put anything out on it yet.
One thing I would fight for if I were Sony is Monster Hunter..makes no sense whatsoever for Monster Hunter 4 not to be announced for the platform yet.
Yet another example of how the people who run this site take themselves way too seriously.
What makes 'Incredipede' a "good game by serious indie developers"? The fact that you personally like it?
What makes 'Postal 2' "irredeemable trash"? I'm not a fan of it, but I'm not so full of myself that I think my personal subjective preference should override everyone else's. Maybe if the creators of the Postal series claimed it was an 'ironic reflection on violence in our society' or 'an attempt to force a discussion on these issues' you guys would fall for it hook, line, and sinker like that Columbine game.
Two things about modern Western society routinely amaze me: the elite snobishness of people who don't actually create anything, and the distrust and disdain for any democratic system (which always becomes exaggerated when that system produces results at odds with said critics' preferences).
The entire concept of Greenlight is that the community decides what games make it. Thus, it works exactly as intended, which is not a failure. You just don't like the results.
Sometimes reading this site is like watching "My Super Sweet 16". But daddy, I wanted a Porsche, not a dumb old BMW! You ruined my LIFE!
The hardware is fantastic. I'd love to run emulators on it, custom apps... and yeah, I'd like to buy Gravity Rush. But there's no way I'm paying that much money for a portable completely dependent on Sony, since I know it'll be another (tiny) boat anchor.
And with all that extra content to put on it Sony could sell a lot more of those outrageously overpriced custom memory cards.
But, like MS, they can't admit they're not Apple.
My 32 gig card is already completely full, I've had to start deleting things.
I'm sure by the time I get through all that, there will be plenty of new Vita games coming over, like Ys Celcetta, and possibly a new Legend of Heroes game. There's a new Dragon Fantasy game already announced for the Vita as well. The Vita has sucked up 60% of my gaming time, while the 3DS languishes at home because it's just not as much fun to play. You have to remember, the first 2 years of any console in the US is a major drought for JRPGs. They not only take a long time to develop, but they also take a long time to translate. I'm not concerned just because there's only 4-5 native jRPGs and Visual Novels right now, and they're mostly ports. That's actually high for a system in its first year.
The newest portable systems are still in the early stages. You're not going to see great, original RPGs on either the 3DS or the Vita in the US until at least late next year, maybe later. Whining about the lack of good original native RPGs on a console that launched less than 2 years ago is one of the more absurd things I've ever seen.
We're at the start of the console cycle, and JRPG fans should have realized by now that there's always a drought of new native titles at the start of a console cycle. I imagine we'll get more original PSP title stragglers before the new Vita titles really start rolling out.
And mega man has had more fanfare than it needed leading up to it's 25 year reunion. It is nice people still remember the blue robot that could, but capcom has essentially killed him. Something usually only Activision or EA could pull off.
I also find it hard to call Star Wars a disappointment - like the article mentions, most of the world knew it was coming. I would put this under 'fulfillment of prophecy' myself - it was under the disappointment column years ago for me when I saw the direction it was going.
E3 has been a disappointment for the last few years, so I guess it can stay on the list, as well as the Vita. I guess not everyone wants a portable console instead they wait for the day when phones, which are socially acceptable to haul around, finally get to the development level and provide it instead.