Yep.
Though with both Borderlands and the initial plan for a COD port I think they were already doing the wrong thing. Vita just wasn't quite there with the power to run proper ports of these games. They should have made new games built from the ground up for it.
Sony should have invested in studios dong what what Capcom is doing with Monster Hunter Rise...
Thus Bioshock Vita (perhaps?)
I get what you're saying and agree, the Vita as just a port-down platform was never going to work. (I didn't like the MW/BO port idea for Call of Duty either, though I wonder what it was going to be.) Those games were valuable, and if it was powerful enough or was more consistent in getting core games, maybe it could have sustained better on ports, but these games were always the lesser version and they were nowhere near enough to maintain Vita if it wasn't going to have original titles.
Building games ground-up for Vita was going to be tough though, as costs were just out of control for that generation of game development. (PSP was sort of a sweet spot, and it got an insane degree of support.) It kind of started out working right with side-games on familiar engines like Assassin's Creed Liberation and LBP Vita, eventually Killzone Mercenaries (which ran on KZ3's engine,) but the hill got tall real fast as Vita launched soft and never gained speed. Then there was the subgame projects like Batman: Arkham Blackgate, Assassin's Creed Chronicles (also AC Lib,) and MotorStorm RC that were built in part for the platform but also fit well into the PSN ecosphere of downloadable franchise alt games, but for some reason the interest in subgames totally dried up on consoles around this time (partly because the big brands were doing annual releases so gamers were not interested in filler, whether it was good or not,) and that left Vita dry as well. Eventually PSVR came along too, and there was no way Sony could keep three pillars going (so far, even two pillars seems to too tall an order.)
That said, Vita was a really great platform for the games you didn't want to take the TV up for, like solo fighting games or long RPGs like P4G. Sometimes the games were too inferior to bother with, but other times they ran just fine (especially for a portable game, at that time) and were the games you were happy to buy on a handheld when you knew you wouldn't make time for them on a console. (Sad that the LEGO games on Vita were the mobile instead of console versions.) Indies thrived by having their games on Vita almost by default because Unity Engine was so well supported on Vita, and even all these years after Sony dropped the platform, there are Vita games releasing (meanwhile, the more successful 3DS has been
mostly brick-breaker games and not much else since 2019.) Switch now is that go-to for me that I pick up when I don't want to take over the TV and crank up the surround, and it similarly is sometimes disappointing (why, Bloodstained, why?!) but other times is a great place to check out games that aren't AAA.
A name: Gio Corsi
The guy raised hype while Sony provided no games to back him up. Great guy, crappy Sony.
Well, Corsi was Senior Director, Third Party Production & Developer Relations (and then later Head of Global Second Party Games, which I'm not sure what that was supposed to mean?) His job was to hype the games
not made by Sony. That pretty quickly the
only games Vita had to hype were games not made by Sony, that is essentially how he came to prominence in the first place.