Tokyo Game Show post mortem

Okay, so that was a painful week, barely moving from the expectation baseline, mostly self-inflicted by the Vita's own userbase. On the positive side, Japan has several threequals to look forward to including more One Piece Pirate Warriors and Sword Art Online, while us in the west should get new titles like Zodiac. Probably easiest to see Sony's own list of games.

Sony's sponsorship of the indie stage didn't produce as much in the way of new goods as I was expecting. But there's still a trickle of new games coming, although I suspect the PS4 is now the primary focus for that effort too.

Worse the rush to "out" non-existent new Vita games, which happened at least twice over the show. On the plus side, it shows gamers and sites care about the Vita, if only we took the time to check things out more often. However, every fluff or misread only cements the message that Sony and partners really are struggling to get anything new off the deck.

If Capcom can't spare the effort to punt an update of a 3DS game to the Vita, there's little hope. Where do we go from here? I suppose I could add PS4 games to the site, citing Remote Play as a valid excuse for some big name games, but otherwise we're all spiraling down to a puddle of indies and niche games, wholly dependent on Japanese translations for anything major.

While Sony PR tries to marshal hype for the next big indie, that's a world of diminishing returns. Expect even less next year at the big shows, when the Vita will become an even smaller backwater the PS4's river of fun. I'm assuming Japanese developers will slide more from 3DS to Vita in the next year or two (as happened with DS-to-PSP) but lack of western sales will further limit any translations, no matter how much noise we make.