This begs to ask the question, is it worth sacrificing one of the key social aspects of gaming for some prettier polies?  With word of mouth being one of the prime ways publishers market games, it makes it awfully counter intuitive to not include these aspects.  Just take a gander at some massively popular franchises like Halo, Gears of War, and Call of Duty, all include local multiplayer.  Look at the technically underpowered Wii, the majority of it's games support local multiplayer, and no one can even begin to contest it's popularity. 

Microsoft and Sony both brag about the new found social aspects of online gaming, like cross game voice and text chat, friends list, and other community features, yet the developers continually forgo the most important one.  Hopefully, as it did for the use of FMVs in the 90s, the multiplayer pendulum will eventually swing back and strike a balance in the middle online and local multiplayer.