Poncho, the cute little indie puzzle platformer, has been out for well over a year. Did you play it? I didn’t, and apparently, I’m not alone in that. Despite being released on Steam, the PS4 and Wii U, the game was not successful. How not successful? Well, according to this postmortem on the game and its release, Poncho's makers haven’t made a single penny from it.

If you’ve ever dreamed of quitting your job and making games for a living, please give this Delve Interactive blog a read. It’s a fascinating look at the development of Poncho, the struggles of crowd funding, issues with going with a publisher, the dangers of giving free keys to YouTubers, and what can happen if the work of art you've spend five years slaving over is a sales bust. It also has some handy tips like “Don’t quit your day job” and “Don’t release in November.”

It can be a bit depressing at times, but thankfully the devs aren’t letting this experience get them down. At the end of the post, the team announced its next game, a randomly generated homeless survival simulator. My gut tells me it won’t exactly blow up the sales chart, but I wish the team at Delve the best of luck with it.

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Since 2009, Feminist Frequency has been tracking harmful representations of women in gaming. During this year's CES, Feminist Frequency's Executive Director Anita Sarkeesian and Managing Editor Carolyn Petit joined us on the Engadget stage to discuss something a little different: some 2016 gaming trends that showed the industry is moving beyond typical stereotypes and tropes and starting to think more differently.

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As we once again reached the end of a year, it's time to look back on the past 366 days (leap year, fool!) to see what it has brought us in terms of Destructoid Community blogs. And who better to summarize the year – recap it, if you will – than the Cblog Recaps team?

Over the course of 2016, just like in any other year, these fine lads and lasses have put in the work to give all of the blogs that get posted on Destructoid the attention they deserve. That's a lot of reading!

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Hi. Hello.

Boy. Yikes. Twenty-sixteen. That was something.

I feel like I’m not going to cover enough ground if I write anything about how just absolutely terrible 2016 was, so instead I’m just going to focus on the good here —and that’s right, I’m talking about the good good video games.

Video games got weirder. They got more polished and refined. More ambitious, more experimental. Crazier, dare I say. It’s a trend that’s been slowly creeping up on us in these past few years, starting with indie titles and working its way into the life force of the industry — until it suddenly exploded out of nowhere and a shit ton of quality video games came into existence left and right. So many quality titles, narrowing it down to just ten is almost insulting. 

In other news, I’ve been doing pretty alright this past 365, thank you for asking! I got my first taste of internet notoriety, got very drunk with Suda51 at a party I co-hosted, made two appearances on Podtoid, and I also filmed an interview with Mega64 that I’m still debating posting or not because that video gets very avant-garde and contains fake blood, technical issues, Mike Cosimano dying of heartbreak, and uh, pubes. No one knows whose pubes.

List time.

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At trade shows, PR teams often try to get our attention by using phrases like "visceral" or "incredibly impressive graphics," and it all sorta blends together after awhile. Not so with Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap, a remake of Dragon's Curse on the TurboGrafx-16. The PSX email enticing me to check out Lizardcube's new game simply said "Guys, it's so cute. You gotta see it. You just gotta." After seeing digital people blasted to bits, shocked to death, and maimed in various ways, I was in the market for cute.

And cute I received!

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It's almost a tradition: Nintendo teases a new product and Nikkei reports a key detail just before its official reveal. The Japanese paper successfully called the Nintendo DSi, key details of the 3DS and got pretty close to the Wii U's launch price. Now, the paper is back with a ballpark price for the Nintendo Switch. According to Nikkei, Nintendo's next device will sell for ¥25,000 in Japan -- about $215 at today's exchange rate.

Source: Nikkei

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While the gaming community has made small strides to highlight intelligent conversation and criticism over the years, it's unfortunately widely known by its loudest majority: "trolls." Try as the community might to incorporate views from folks other than white males, there's still an incredible amount of hate and bile. No doubt piling onto this is the latest attempt at a reality show from the producers of Catfish: The TV Series. 

As found on casting sites and Craigslist, Beyond the Keyboard is a program looking for "Fake Gamer Girl TROLLS" who are "sick" of "fake gamer girls and boobie streamers" who amass views on Twitch and YouTube while "real gamer channels" are ignored. Even worse is the main crux of the series that'll have the chosen troll, uh, "confront the phony gamer...face-to-face and show them what geek culture is really about." It's not limited to video game hate speech either as the show is also looking tor individuals who furiously disagree with the following topics: 

Feminism, Gaming, Vegans, Conspiracy Theories, Rival Sports Teams, Syrian Refugees, Immigration, Black Lives Matter, LGBT/Trans issues, etc

To put it bluntly, this series will only serve to fuel hatred and further give terrible people more power than they already have now. The only ones I can see enjoying, or even conceiving this premise, are those who already exercise the horrible behavior this series wants to promote. Who thought it was a good idea to force an unwilling person to meet someone who's been viciously degrading them online? It's already hard enough for women in gaming (and anyone who doesn't align with white males), so I hope this show burns to the ground before it can ever happen. 

Now Casting: Fake Gamer Girl TROLLS! [Craigslist]

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Technology should be accessible to everyone, and that includes gamers. Indeed, one of the most popular requests received by the Ben Heck Show Team has been to create custom controllers. The current generation of game consoles have made this difficult, especially the PlayStation 4, and in fact, it wasn't until a recent third-party controller came to market that Ben and Felix found an easy way to hack in custom parts.

Watch in this episode as Felix tears down the controller, while Ben shows us how to measure and model the gamepad as a guide for creating 3D-printed or laser-cut pieces. Then it's up to Ben and Karen to put the controller through its paces. What other gamepads do you think the team should create or modify for accessibility? Let the team know over on the element14 Community.

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With a new year comes the opportunity to open up a new front in the console war, and now it's taking place on the battlefield of people's tastes in anime. Crunchyroll has released a series of infographics breaking down the popularity of its recent offerings based on which console owners were watching via the various platforms' Crunchyroll streaming app. 

The infographics measure how much more popular a show is compared to the median across the other consoles. For example, the one-off special Persona 5: The Day Breakers got 31% more views among PS4 users than on the other consoles, and the magical girl parody show Cute High Earth Defense Club LOVE! is 162% more popular on Wii U than the average, and 68% more popular among PS3 viewers.

Other interesting trends and tidbits include popularity spikes for JoJo's Bizarre Adventure on the Wii U, the more niche preferences of PS Vita owners, Xbox 360 and XBone owners' love of battle shows, and PS4 users' recognition of the gloriousness that is wuxia puppet epic Thunderbolt Fantasy.

Check out the infographics in the gallery, see a list of the most disproportionately popular anime on each platform below, and see the most popular Crunchyroll-served by country over here. Which console has the best taste?

Crunchyroll reveals 2016's most popular anime by console [IGN via NeoGAF]

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