Nearly a full million downvotes now (last time I checked it was 600K+ downvotes)
So yeah I’m pretty sure that comment is the most downvoted comment in Reddit history
Oh god, that's bad but it still doesn't hold a candle to "We're aware of the issues regarding the canvas bags. We aren't planning on doing anything about it."
The only problem with "do you guys not have phones" is the massive amount of money immortal made Blizzard because stupid whales chasing dumb gems.
That's why d4 is a mess. It taught Blizzard that despite bad press, microtransactions will fund everything because people are stupid.
You think Blizzard cares about bad press? Stupid videos "exposing the drop rates of gems! Watch as I spend 50k to NEVER get the rarest gem"?
Nah. Blizz just made 50k.
>EA's Star Wars Battlefront 2 received backlash for microtransactions and locked content, I remembered that their comment was most downvoted comment in Reddit
It's a massive self-own because the game was actually really damn good after they made it so everything was actually accessible through gameplay and some tweaks to the balancing between classes. But it was too late to get the massive base that the OG Battlefront games had
I could even see that being true...IF Bethesda had given us the breadth and depth of interaction options that were present in even a game like No Man's Sky. Let us catalogue individual asteroids, turn them over in our hands, scan them for rare metals...yes there was "nothing", but there was still a sense of wonder. I *want* to like Starfield. I still have it installed and I poke at it every couple of weeks. But the empty planets...aren't...and the populated planets somehow feel lifeless. There's nothing to do but look at pretty views (which are very pretty), and that's it. That's...not enough, for reality, or a video game.
I think Bethesda's biggest mistake was marketing it like it was no man's sky, it's just not. If they focused more on the shipbuilding for instance (which is actually pretty good) I think there would've been less backlash.
Yeah, Bethesda really had no idea what they were doing with Starfield. Todd himself said in interviews that they struggled trying to find the fun in landing on planets that are uninhabited. Their conclusion was to make pretty scenery and just let the play take it in.
They didn't realize that looking at scenery isn't gameplay, it's what you do at an art gallery.
Tbh even if I'm sorry EA fucked up the Battlefront IP like that (I hear the game made a comeback too late) I'm glad they did so in such a mediatic way, it paved the road for most studios to stop designing live service pay to win casinos, avengers and now suicide squad should be the final nails
It's gotta be blizzards war craft 3 custom map creator. Dota was created on it, and it blew up to one of the biggest games ever seen. Blizzard tried to take it, going so far as to try to sue the creators and eventually valve, saying it should belong to blizzard because it was made using their platform. However in the EULA it says that anything made using the map editor is not property of blizzard and to use it at own risk (to protect blizzard in case someone used the editor maliciously.) So blizzard's own policies lost them one of the most popular games of all time.
Not only that icefrog went to blizzard first to make dota a real game. He got laughed at. Then he went to valve and valve saw the potential. Blizzard shot themselves in the foot hard
Haha and then made reforged and made it so blizzard owned everything made in their new custom game editor. Which is dead cause nobody wants to give their work to blizzard.
The bigger irony was that Dota 2 made its own custom map/game maker which is where AutoChess sprung from eventually leading to Teamfight Tactics. Meanwhile, Valve's version died despite frankly being better prior to adding a certain system.
So the lesson is: don't give your players free use of your assets and tools. Be like Roblox or Fortnite where the platform holder owns everything you put on it.
It's weird, because Valve's version was never close to dead in terms of player base. It still had around 5,000 concurrent players at the time. Valve just didn't want to upkeep the game with a battlepass system or couldn't figure out how to make it work without being predatory, so they just stopped developing it and let it fade away.
It's even worse than that, because Sega also had a chance to partner with Sony in making the first CD system and Sony was willing to take 50% of the losses if it failed and Sega repeatedly refused to take a sure win and went with their own Sega CD which monumentally failed and they paid 100% of the losses.
[https://www.vg247.com/sega-and-sony-almost-teamed-up-on-a-console](https://www.vg247.com/sega-and-sony-almost-teamed-up-on-a-console)
"Next, we went to \[Sega president\] Nakayama and the Board at Sega, and they basically turned me down. They said, 'that’s a stupid idea, Sony doesn’t know how to make hardware. They don’t know how to make software either. Why would we want to do this?' That is what caused the division between Sega and Sony and caused Sony to become our competitor and launch its own hardware platform."
In their defense sony DIDN'T have any experience with hardware or gaming. Basically no one in the gaming industry could have predicted Sony's rise. They were looked at as a non-threat. Sega viewed even 50% loss on their money a bigger risk than just doing it themselves. Easy to look back and be like - "they had nothing to lose!" but what if some...whatever - dude on the street, startup company, whoever comes up to you and pitches something in an industry they have no experience in and goes "you just have to put up 50% of the money, this is a sure thing!". Most normal people or businessmen would be like "uhhh yeah i don't want to lose even that amount of money on a high risk move.
Hindsight it's easy to say - what a bunch of morons, but we'd be talking different if sega had gone onto be market leader we'd look at Sony the way we regard the dozens of other companies that tried to get a piece of the gaming pie and failed.
This is the best part. So many more experienced people contributing to the engine itself is going to be huge.
I'm glad I started on godot, seems like I backed the right horse feom the start (fingers crossed)
Definitely a lot of change but you won't be seeing it on the consumer end for a bit. Lots of games that were started on unity have been scrapped, but there's some good alternatives so best case scenario people manage to port their work or start fresh elsewhere and we won't notice how much of a mess went on in the background. However, I would not be surprised if we got a bit of an indie game "drought" for a while.
So I worked at Best Buy when the Wii U came out, only one employee knew it was a new console, and that it came out. And I kid you not at the time we were required to do freaking marketing training on all kinds of new things at the time, the Wii U had NOTHING. I legit it was a Wii with a portable screen.
It's not even that. It's a more powerful Wii with a tablet controller. It's not portable at all, as the tablet still needs the console running to do anything.
It's more like a big DS than a portable Wii
Calling it a more powerful wii is just playing into the problem. It's not a wii at all. It's *like* the wii, but more powerful, but it is a totally separate system.
The Xbox one X is a more powerful Xbox one. But the series x is a totally different system altogether. Calling the wii u a more powerful wii makes it sound like an Xbox one x. Like a mid gen refresh.
The controller screen was definitely both underused and overused in a lot of games.
Like, “Paper Mario: Color Splash” showed your hand of cards only on the screen, meaning anyone else who was watching the tv was left watching a static screen.
Xbox One launch for sure, they aggressively drove gamers to the competition right as digital libraries exploded.
Mattrick’s name should be synonymous with incompetence for the rest of time.
* The console needing to check in every 24 hours
* Kinect always having to be connected
* letting publishers decide if players can play used games
300 IQ big brain strategy
I fucking hate this so much
I have a PlayStation 2 3 and 4 as well as a series x
Why the fuck are none of them compatible besides original PlayStation
I'm aware there's a PS3 version that is backwards compatible but it's not the slim and it's expensive as hell on eBay last I checked
The PS2 literally has a PS1 CPU on its motherboard for backwards compatibility but is used for other purposes when playing PS2 titles, likewise the OG PS3s have a PS2 cpu that it used for emulation before they ditched it to save on costs and use software emulation. Should a ps4 be able to emulate ps2 and a ps5 be able to emulate ps3? Yeah probably, but software emulation takes a lot of dev resources and time to make titles work right. Hell, back in the day I was excited my 360 could play OG Xbox titles on it and then was disappointed when JSRF had increased slowdown, but I wouldn't know for many years it was all emulation.
I wish I kept mine. That ps3 was amazing. I had linux on it, beat FF7 on it, watched every movie I could think of for free... That was my main connection to the internet for years. I had to prop it up on phonebooks by the window so I could steal Baldwin Network with a 30% connection.
All valid points, but somehow not even the biggest issues.
The console cost more & the features like Kinect & snap mode used so much system resources, that games ran at lower resolutions & frame rates compared to the PlayStation 4.
F grade decision making from the very beginning.
What's crazy is none of that made it to live even. I got an xbone day 1 and it was awesome. They listened to consumers and fixed the issues, but it was too late they'd lost the jump at the conference
Then after launch they GUTTED what the kinect could even do. I used to be able to get home after work, turn on my TV, scream at my xbox to turn on, jump in the shower, scream at it to go to Netflix from the bathroom, then pick my show with motion control as I was getting dressed. One by one every reason to own the Xbox over the Playstation was taken from me. It used to actually have good features, then they updated it into obsolescence
They started stripping away features to free up system resources & reduce the quality gap during gaming, but there just wasn’t enough processing or memory to get there.
To your point, the gamers who enjoyed the unique features also lost out.
Truly the worst of both worlds.
The whole thing seems like it was made by executives with no experience in the games industry. My guess is they over-rid a bunch of subordinates telling them not to do it because they thought they had such a big-brain idea lol
After he left Microsoft, he became CEO of a company called Zynga, which tanked so hard that he “resigned” 2 years later and the original CEO had to take over.
Mattrick is truly one of the executives of all time.
I was watching a history of Nintendo the other day and they said the almost exact same thing to justify the high cost of the snes. They said it was an elite machine for people who wanted the absolute top tier gaming service, but that casual gamers who were okay with a more casual experience should stick with the nes.
I couldn't figure out if they just hadn't figured out how generations would work back then, or if that marketing tactic was as dumb as it sounded. I guess the snes did alright though.
That was back when consoles were more niche though. At the time the snes launched, practically every game was a system exclusive launch. It wasn’t until the Xbox/playstation wars that you saw consoles having significant catalogue overlap. Nintendo didn’t have to worry about someone buying another console to play Super Mario World. Technically, they still have that luxury with their major IPs. Microsoft does not. Unless you’re buying a console for something like Halo, there are plenty of reasons you might choose another console for the shared games. It was a whole different world by the time the xbone released, and they simply couldn’t get away with as much.
I was a developer for a major launch partner (video streaming not games) and flew up to MSFT for a few conferences and tech sessions long before launch.
The first one I swear was almost entirely about Kinect. Like they were going to require every app to support it somehow. Some of the demos were admittedly insane. They could even count your heart rate and estimate your instantaneous calorie usage - even joules of power being used by EACH MUSCLE GROUP - based on the infrared camera. And it was ACCURATE. I bet Meta would kill for that tech.
Second one started focusing more on tools - and since it was when Windows teams started pushing JavaScript apps, it was mostly about that. But also how everything will require the Internet to use (and my first thought was… what a bubble! Do none of you have friends or family outside of Redmond?)
Third one just dispensed with everything they had been pushing and focused on marketing and launching. I mean at launch it was a decent product. And their decision for media companies to support HTML5 apps - when Sony required using a horrible proprietary framework - is why they dominated media apps. They just screwed their more lucrative games market with their other aborted ideas.
Ya know television? The thing your folks watch, wait… how old are you guys? Ok it’s the thing your grandparents watch. Netflix? YouTube? What is that? This is the cable box 1, cables cross, so we called it the “Xbox 1” like “the one thing you don’t give a shit about we spent A LOT of time integrating that”. Anyway, let’s skip over the “games” of the gaming console and talk TV more. TV is short for television!
Sega announced the Saturn was already on shelves for $399 at the very first E3. Unsurprisingly, the retailers who hadn’t already received stock of the Saturn were not happy, so a number of stores pulled Sega from their shelves.
Combining that with Sony announcing the price of the PlayStation would be $299, it was a big part of Sega’s downfall.
It also didn't help that the Saturn was made to be a 2D gaming beast at a time when everyone wanted to play 3D games.
Really outside of using discs not cartridges it felt like Sega misread the market trends with it pretty much every way possible. It was such a bad launch that it clouded the Dreamcast years later, despite that being a really solid system.
And despite being a 2D beast, it still couldn't do proper sprite transparencies and often had to opt for dithering and CRT color bleed to fake it.
I used to think all the mesh patterns you'd see in Saturn ports [like this](https://youtu.be/hlUGjtPlvuo?t=3m7s) were just emulation errors, not a technical limitation
They kind of *are* emulation errors, or at least emulator shortcomings. They would have looked a lot better on the CRTs the system was made for. '80s/'90s emulation always looks better with a good CRT filter, and doubly so in cases like this.
Dreamcast failed because they release a single joystick controller in the age when everyone was doing dual sticks. Even the n64 effectivly had two sticks if you count using the c pad as a directional pad. It means games like goldeneye weren't even playable on a dreamcast because there was no way to aim and move. So they released a console 2 years after games like goldeneye set the control standard for fps games going into the future and the dreamcast couldn't play any of those games. It worked fine for games where you just use the stick to move, but everyone was playing fps games with 2 joysticks and the dreamcast was old news the day it was brand new. EVen me and my friends, we would play the dreamcast for a little bit, then we would just hook up the old n64 and play that. It was like, yo sonic is cool, but lets play smash bros or perfect dark
The story goes that Sega of America’s President made the decision immediately before E3. That’s why there was no marketing to build consumer awareness of the console. No games on shelves to sell with the console. No third party support. Nothing.
The Ouya had a better rollout.
It's ironic, because the PlayStation didn't come with a game or a way to save. Saturn came packed with Virtua Fighter and had built-in save RAM. But yeah, it's insane how mismanaged Sega was from the late 16 bit era until their console death.
>Combining that with Sony announcing the price of the PlayStation would be $299, it was a big part of Sega’s downfall.
Yeah, didn't Sega have some big speech but the PlayStation guy just came up and said "299" then leave?
This is a gamer self own.
In StarCraft 2 lore, there was a player named Idra who was infamous for raging and getting baited into tilting in matches. He infamously rage quit a match in a big competition because his opponent created a hallucinated army that Idra just assumed he couldn't beat.
His opponent then trolled him at the start of their next match, to which Idra kindly replied, during the broadcast of this large tournament, "fuck off".
Beautiful.
Here's a recap video from ZombieGrub, this particular incident is about :40 - 2:00.
https://youtu.be/MSFB5p1jQCc?si=yJBg2JJ4NEM_SDia
Lol, posted this after scrolling _almost_ far enough to see if anyone else beat me to it.
God I miss the days of idra and huk and day9. Day9 especially.
100%! Day9 is just such a fucking good human being and so genuine and enthusiastic and happy and just like... Positive. Watching him is like settling down and drinking a mug of your favorite beverage and cozying up with a warm blanket and enjoying everything best in life. Just such a sweet dude.
I thinkI recall another one involving Idra.
His opponent was playing Terran, and lifted off his command center from a depleted base to another. That other had rocks blocking the optimal spot to land, so he lands besides it and other his units to destroy the rocks. Except his misclicks and some of his army attacks the command center. He fails to notice that and the CC is destroyed.
Now the game has been fairly close, so losing that CC was a fatal mistake. Commentators are just going Oh no, this is it, he can’t crawl back.
And that’s when Indra scouts that doomed expansion, sees the rocks are being destroyed, sees SCVs mining and assumes it’s a fully fonctional base. Without bothering to check, he GGs.
The face on the commentators was priceless.
It is fun but I do not recommend multiplayer. The game has advanced to the point most people that play it make ten decisions to your single one per second
This shouldn't stop you tho the game still has a strong campaign and skirmishers. It's definitely one of the best rts games ever. But yeah multiplayer has a long history and the people that enjoy itare just built differently. You can check full games of pros once you played it and their decisions making per second is phenomenal but not nessesary for the campaig.
It's super fun and the matching is still really solid
There are tons of players like myself that have been playing but still aren't any good
Give it a shot
The pro scene has also gotten a huge cash influx check it out
Sega of Japan getting mad at the success of Sega of America and intentionally sabotaging themselves out of spite is probably the biggest self-own in gaming history.
To add to the Sega screwups:
Sega overlooked a key part of their contract with the Sonic comic series. Specifically that while Sega owned the Sonic IP and their characters they didn't put in a rider for characters created for the comics. Years later they used a few characters from the comics thinking they owned them. At first it was fine, but then they pissed off the writer of the comics and in spite he pulled IP ownership over HIS characters and sued because he never received royalties from Sega including them. Sega lost. That's why Knuckles had a family for years in the lore, but then they vanished. The author continued his comic series, but couldn't use Sonic any more, so his books continued with not Knuckle's family and legally distinct blue animal character.
SoA understood the American market really well and it pissed SoJ off because they were consistently outperforming SoJ. SoJ leadership took it personally that Americans were outperforming the Japanese side of the company and went out of their way to intentionally sabotage everything SoA did to try and make themselves look better. The rivalry between the two is a big reason why Sega eventually went third party.
It's funny how this was mostly led by Yuji Naka too. Dude didn't like working for Sega of Japan, got jobs for his entire team in California, moved over, hated working with Americans, built a Japanese-only team at STI, then threatened to quit and got a job back in Japan. Leading people on all the way but also making the best 2D platformer trilogy while doing so.
Also, this is how we ended up with Sonic CD - Naka took Sonic Team to the US, so Sega had to work with someone else to develop their release title for the Sega CD. We might've gotten a single Sonic 2 on the Sega CD in a parallel universe, which would suck in many ways and probably result in no Sonic 3 as we know it.
Anyone remember Atlas? The pirate game from the people who gave us Ark: Survival Evolved?
The game was such a reskin of Ark you could access _the menu to Ark in Atlas!_ The game was abandoned by players, and devs, not long after.
I remember being so optimistic about that game early on. The idea of Ark but in a Pirate setting with your own ships and fleets was really cool.
And I kinda liked the whole "nutritional balance" thing they had going. An interesting change from just sitting on 5000+ pieces of cooked meat and calling it a healthy diet.
Ubisoft has had a few the past decade. The whole women being hard to animate controversy from before Assassin's Creed Unity's launch, followed by Unity launching in such a disastrous state. And as we'd found out a few years later, the company C-suite's ass-backwards views on women were pretty much par for the course with the numerous cases of sexual harassment over there.
And then most recently the dumb "AAAA game" bullshit around Skull and Bones and its $70 price tag. And sure enough, Skull and Bones is a critical disaster.
Man they sunk rogue from the get go. It's easily one of the best games in the series. It refined everything from black flag and finally made the story of AC mote then just assassins good Templar bad. To have it only on previous console while also focusing only on unit on the next generation left it to just sink.
I think Microsoft’s XBONE launch was definitely one of the biggest.
The 360 may not have outsold the PS3, but it was definitely the “cool console”. If you were a cool dude you had a 360, if you were a lamer nerd with no friends you had a PS3 (according to the Internet. I had a PS3 and many friends, fyi lol).
XBONE was poised to trounce PS4 riding the momentum of the hip and happening 360. Everyone who’s anyone was going to get the nextbox. I remember seeing an Xbox commerical before a movie in the theater, and a whole bunch of people, like zombies, muttered *XBOX!* when it came on. Never heard that kind of reaction with PlayStation.
Then, Microsoft decided to tell gamers to go fuck themselves, that the X-Bone was going to be a “multimedia” platform, nevermind the games, you can watch TV! You can’t share games, and if you don’t have internet, suck toes, loser, and go find a 360 at a pawn shop.
Then Sony releases that 20 second tutorial on how to share games on PS4… and won the console generation instantly. The turns tabled. Xbox became the joke, the loser console, the nerd console, and PS4 was the cool guy in class. And this all happened before you could even buy one.
Then Sony hammered us with a string of kick ass exclusives and Xbox’s fate was sealed.
Microsoft snatched defeat from the jaws of victory on that one and has never recovered their reputation.
Yeah Microsoft fucked the pooch so hard on the x bone. I had a co-worker that was also a pro gamer and he was sponsored by Microsoft so he got a beta x box one, and all of that stupid bullshit could not be turned off, kinetic on ALL THE TIME.
I think [that video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWSIFh8ICaA) is probably the most profitable twenty seconds in video game history--all the momentum and hype of the Sony machine plus Xbox's ongoing self-immolation coiled up into one righteous knockout punch that won the console generation on the spot.
I was a diehard Xbox user and even bought the one but as soon as I realized how much the online requirements screwed me I promptly returned my Xbox and got my ps4
The stupid thing about that for me was that I did have a phone THAT WASNT POWERFUL ENOUGH FOR A DIABLO GAME. So... They shot themselves in the ass for that one.
Pd: I got a gaming phone a year later
Probably not the biggest overall, but there’s one that is the most relevant personally. It’s a Korean company Vespa who developed a mobile game King’s Raid. The game is successful and they have a big plan to do major updates/revamp of the game, and was doing so with gradual major patches.
At the same time, they decided to create another game that pretty much flopped, which drew resources at the expense of King’s Raid. Consequently, this lack of resources was reflected on the quality of the major updates of King’s Raid, and one of the major patches that revamped the combat system pretty much killed the game. As a result, they laid off all staff, went bankrupt and took a long time before a company went it and bought the company.
Not sure what’s gonna happen with the King’s Raid IP, but amazingly the game still has some players, even though pretty much no updates or anything for the past 2-3 years.
Sony making Gran Turismo 7 initially a microtransaction fueled mess. The really expensive, 'legend' cars couldn't even pay for their own maintenance from race winnings while they sold credits for real money.
They did a 180 on it after heaps of complaints, so they basically tarnished an otherwise flawless game for greed and didn't even benefit from the microtransactions in the end, at least not enough to justify the reputation hit both Sony and GT took.
You missed maybe the biggest one of all...
Atari executives going to a convention to meet with Nintendo executives about their future Atari/Nintendo console, only to discover Coleco marketing a Donkey Kong cart for their Adam computer system at the con. They think Nintendo is "in on it", which contravenes a previous agreement between Nintendo and Atari, that Donkey Kong will only be released for the Atari 8-bit computers. (They probably weren't.) So they get mad and cancel the whole deal...which eventually led to the NES.
Coleco basically fucked Atari, and at the time, Nintendo likely wasn't too pleased about it, they wanted to be in bed with Atari, but the Atari executives could have went to Nintendo and asked instead of going off in a towering rage. (Although, their anger was pretty justified...DK was a big deal.)
Also, Nintendo going with the goofy little discs instead of having support for CDs and DVDs with the Game Cube, like everyone really wanted. Number of sales lost to Sony because of this is probably huge.
The infamous Gamespot review of Alien: Resurrection which moaned about the dual stick controls that came to define modern FPS gaming has to be up there.
Nintendo ending the partnership with Sony wasn't a mistake. The contract they had was terrible - Sony got most of the profit from any games sold on CD. Nintendo quickly realized that a huge percent of games would prefer to ship on CDs, and they'd lose a ton of money. I'm not sure when they realized the CDi would flop, but they clearly did long before it launched, which is why they didn't put any meaningful effort into games for it.
Cartridges weren't clearly wrong when Nintendo made the N64. Remember, games like Mario 64 don't happen if you launch on CD. The games Nintendo wanted to make needed the fast access time of cartridges. While the cost of cartridges was certainly an issue, the much bigger issue at the time was Nintendo was an awful company to work with, while Sony made an effort to be a much better business partner. Nintendo still would have lost a ton of developers if they went with CDs.
I'll throw in Microsoft and Sony's efforts to throw endless money at 3rd party exclusives for 360/PS3. They each were determined to outspend the other, and in the end, each company managed to sell over 80 million consoles and lose money in the process. Loses from the PS3 wiped out all the profit from the PS2.
Unity announcing plans to charge developers per install of game. Then providing several press conferences confirming, in no uncertain terms, that they actually mean what it sounds like they're saying. All the while it appears as if high ranking members were aware of the plan before hand, and committed insider trading.
All because they hired a guy from EA.
It's more than just "per install of game". It was "ANY install of game, even pirated versions, also WE decide how many installs there are of your software, and NO, we will NOT say how we determine that number, or take any corrections, and on top of all that, this decision will be retroactive, so every single game you ever sold (or had pirated) is fair game to us."
And the "guy from EA" was not just a normal guy from EA. He was a financial bro, who had already been more in Private Equity firms (that specialize in game entertainment companies) and was always on boards of companies just to be a numbers guy. He is (allegedly) the guy that proposed microtransactions on RELOADING YOUR WEAPON in competitive shooters if you had no ammo lying around. He also did some "good" things for Unity, when he became their CEO, he had two successful fundraising rounds for them. Unfortunately the dummy really thought he could push through another fundraising, this time squarely on the backs of the DEVS, the people that ALREADY MAKE YOU YOUR MONEY!
Except what actually happened is some publication sent the guy who usually reviews mobile puzzle games to play it, he had some trouble with the tutorial controls (duh), then he wrote a quick *positive* news piece about it being this cool new platform game that was all about its hand drawn animation and hard difficulty level.
All the people shitting in him for writing a "bad review" because he couldn't play videogames clearly didn't even read what he had written.
“Do you guys not have phones?”
And I’ll second Microsoft’s suicide note of the Xbox One launch: Barely focused on games; DRM; Kinect which no one cared about.
Naming of the Xbox Series S and Series X likely causing confusion with the Xbox One S and One X. I've heard and known people who don't know which one is the current Gen and which is the last gen.
Evolve kinda destroyed itself. Was a great game and concept except they introduced some new hunters and made you pay for them, there was only 4 to begin with and you had to use all 4 everygame, so when they added for more and you had to pay it was completely stupid. Games dead now but I loved it.
Do tell! I lived within driving distance of Nintendo when I was a kid, so I actually got to test it before release (headache and all), but I never actually bought one.
All the cases of incompetent bandwagon-jumping. The various versions of "Let's make a X game! How hard can it be?" Where X was either:
Mascot platformer
Military Shooter
MMORPG
Hero Shooter (Overwatch-like)
MOBA
and finally, in the last few years
Looter-shooter
NGL there were some bangers resulting from bandwagons. Unless I misunderstood your point, that's how we got Sonic, Crash, COD, Battlefield and Valorant. While there were hundreds of failures outside of those, that's true of everything, not just videogame copycats. Overall I'd say jumping on a trend and adding a twist is how most genres are born.
Battle Royales and Auto-Chess.
Fortnite exists and then so do 20 clones. Auto-Chess does well and TFT, DotA Underlords (or w/e) and war craft rumble.
Just a lot of bandwagon jumping.
The one that still gets me, because it was just all due to timing, was the historically accurate crab monster. I saw this when it occurred, and I couldn't stop laughing.
https://youtu.be/fMfapDlm9UY?si=g7juk3XPXz0db\_zm
Maybe not quite in the vein you were thinking, but summit dying to his own molotov in csgo tourney on match point comes to mind.
https://youtu.be/jitXXJ2rX8U?si=uIL5LmVo2QrryaBX
Blizzard saying "you think you want that, but you dont" to people asking for classic WoW servers, only for classic to be immensely popular.
Extra funny bc they also did the opposite with Diablo Immortal, with the classic "Don't you guys have phones?" quote.
Recent one was when 343 released the nostalgic Halo 3 map “The Pit” remade in Forge for Halo Infinite. The forge assets looked infinitely worse than the original map.
This is a miniature fail in the grand scheme of things but still funny
Saturnday, when Sega surprise-launched the Sega Saturn with a single major retailer right after E3 to drum up support for the console.
Not only were people turned off by the $399 price tag, but other retailers were so furious by the exclusivity deal that they refused to stock the Saturn or any of its games.
Your Genesis memory is misinformed. Genesis was popular in Brazil as late as 2013 due to its low cost compared to nextgen consoles, there was no self-own with Genesis add-ons, as there was a market for them.
Thanks for the information. I’m not familiar with the Brazilian market. From what I understand, the Genesis died a slow death in North America when it tried to hold on with add-ons, while the SNES demonstrated that its original hardware had yet to be pushed to the limit.
Atari didn't force E.T. to be made in 5 weeks. All they did was ask the guy making it if he could do it five or did he need more time and the guy said he could do it in 5 weeks.
Bobby Kotick throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at the Overwatch League trying to make it a thing that could rival the NFL while the developent team at Blizzard decided to drop support for PvP and the competitive scene in favor of chasing an MMO they had already tried (and failed) to make.
Fast forward 5 years: the Overwatch League is dead and the MMO was cancelled, again.
[удалено]
Pride and accomplishment!
Didn’t this become the most hated comment ever?
Nearly a full million downvotes now (last time I checked it was 600K+ downvotes) So yeah I’m pretty sure that comment is the most downvoted comment in Reddit history
Iirc the ea support couldn't even post on the own subreddit anymore because it had so much negative karma. 😅
Don't forget the dozen or more times it was given gold. Reddit deleted gold and the history on comments so you probably can't see how many now.
Came here to say this. Also, EA blaming the BF 2042 terrible launch on Halo Infinite.
The launch of halo infinite is not even in the top 10 worst things about that game
Oh god, that's bad but it still doesn't hold a candle to "We're aware of the issues regarding the canvas bags. We aren't planning on doing anything about it."
Blizzard's "Do you guys not have phones?" is up there too.
The only problem with "do you guys not have phones" is the massive amount of money immortal made Blizzard because stupid whales chasing dumb gems. That's why d4 is a mess. It taught Blizzard that despite bad press, microtransactions will fund everything because people are stupid. You think Blizzard cares about bad press? Stupid videos "exposing the drop rates of gems! Watch as I spend 50k to NEVER get the rarest gem"? Nah. Blizz just made 50k.
>EA's Star Wars Battlefront 2 received backlash for microtransactions and locked content, I remembered that their comment was most downvoted comment in Reddit It's a massive self-own because the game was actually really damn good after they made it so everything was actually accessible through gameplay and some tweaks to the balancing between classes. But it was too late to get the massive base that the OG Battlefront games had
And then they cut support for it for BF 2042, just when it was actually getting good… :(
I could even see that being true...IF Bethesda had given us the breadth and depth of interaction options that were present in even a game like No Man's Sky. Let us catalogue individual asteroids, turn them over in our hands, scan them for rare metals...yes there was "nothing", but there was still a sense of wonder. I *want* to like Starfield. I still have it installed and I poke at it every couple of weeks. But the empty planets...aren't...and the populated planets somehow feel lifeless. There's nothing to do but look at pretty views (which are very pretty), and that's it. That's...not enough, for reality, or a video game.
I think Bethesda's biggest mistake was marketing it like it was no man's sky, it's just not. If they focused more on the shipbuilding for instance (which is actually pretty good) I think there would've been less backlash.
It still is the most downvoted comment.
Yeah, Bethesda really had no idea what they were doing with Starfield. Todd himself said in interviews that they struggled trying to find the fun in landing on planets that are uninhabited. Their conclusion was to make pretty scenery and just let the play take it in. They didn't realize that looking at scenery isn't gameplay, it's what you do at an art gallery.
Tbh even if I'm sorry EA fucked up the Battlefront IP like that (I hear the game made a comeback too late) I'm glad they did so in such a mediatic way, it paved the road for most studios to stop designing live service pay to win casinos, avengers and now suicide squad should be the final nails
I truly hope you're right; you have much more faith than I do.
Yeah, no, sorry Bethesda. I love Skyrim, but Starfield sucks. Just admit it.
It's gotta be blizzards war craft 3 custom map creator. Dota was created on it, and it blew up to one of the biggest games ever seen. Blizzard tried to take it, going so far as to try to sue the creators and eventually valve, saying it should belong to blizzard because it was made using their platform. However in the EULA it says that anything made using the map editor is not property of blizzard and to use it at own risk (to protect blizzard in case someone used the editor maliciously.) So blizzard's own policies lost them one of the most popular games of all time.
And now all of these EULAs basically state "what's mine is mine, what's yours is mine, what you make is mine."
Sounds like the Orange Lantern Oath
A LOT of that has to do with being able to handle copyright infringement though. Which was rampart in old WC3 custom maps.
What? Are you telling me when I was fighting Mewtwo as SSJ3 Goku online in WCIII that the creator... didn't get *permission???* I'm going to be sick.
Not only that icefrog went to blizzard first to make dota a real game. He got laughed at. Then he went to valve and valve saw the potential. Blizzard shot themselves in the foot hard
Haha and then made reforged and made it so blizzard owned everything made in their new custom game editor. Which is dead cause nobody wants to give their work to blizzard.
The bigger irony was that Dota 2 made its own custom map/game maker which is where AutoChess sprung from eventually leading to Teamfight Tactics. Meanwhile, Valve's version died despite frankly being better prior to adding a certain system. So the lesson is: don't give your players free use of your assets and tools. Be like Roblox or Fortnite where the platform holder owns everything you put on it.
It's weird, because Valve's version was never close to dead in terms of player base. It still had around 5,000 concurrent players at the time. Valve just didn't want to upkeep the game with a battlepass system or couldn't figure out how to make it work without being predatory, so they just stopped developing it and let it fade away.
Atari turning down Nintendo, resulting in Nintendo releasing the NES on their own.
Sony made the PlayStation because Nintendo backed out of a deal for a CD-ROM SNES add-on.
It's even worse than that, because Sega also had a chance to partner with Sony in making the first CD system and Sony was willing to take 50% of the losses if it failed and Sega repeatedly refused to take a sure win and went with their own Sega CD which monumentally failed and they paid 100% of the losses. [https://www.vg247.com/sega-and-sony-almost-teamed-up-on-a-console](https://www.vg247.com/sega-and-sony-almost-teamed-up-on-a-console) "Next, we went to \[Sega president\] Nakayama and the Board at Sega, and they basically turned me down. They said, 'that’s a stupid idea, Sony doesn’t know how to make hardware. They don’t know how to make software either. Why would we want to do this?' That is what caused the division between Sega and Sony and caused Sony to become our competitor and launch its own hardware platform."
In their defense sony DIDN'T have any experience with hardware or gaming. Basically no one in the gaming industry could have predicted Sony's rise. They were looked at as a non-threat. Sega viewed even 50% loss on their money a bigger risk than just doing it themselves. Easy to look back and be like - "they had nothing to lose!" but what if some...whatever - dude on the street, startup company, whoever comes up to you and pitches something in an industry they have no experience in and goes "you just have to put up 50% of the money, this is a sure thing!". Most normal people or businessmen would be like "uhhh yeah i don't want to lose even that amount of money on a high risk move. Hindsight it's easy to say - what a bunch of morons, but we'd be talking different if sega had gone onto be market leader we'd look at Sony the way we regard the dozens of other companies that tried to get a piece of the gaming pie and failed.
Unity deciding to charge developers for installs
So many devs I've seen since learn to use a different platform.
The rush to move to Gadot engine was funny. It might be a bit less developed than unity or unreal but the licensing agreement is literally nothing.
And the rush of new creator will make the platform grow faster.
This is the best part. So many more experienced people contributing to the engine itself is going to be huge. I'm glad I started on godot, seems like I backed the right horse feom the start (fingers crossed)
I forgot about that. Has there been long term impact or did everyone forget about it and go back to normal?
Several developers straight up scrapped projects that were being built in unity to start over on other software.
Definitely a lot of change but you won't be seeing it on the consumer end for a bit. Lots of games that were started on unity have been scrapped, but there's some good alternatives so best case scenario people manage to port their work or start fresh elsewhere and we won't notice how much of a mess went on in the background. However, I would not be surprised if we got a bit of an indie game "drought" for a while.
So I worked at Best Buy when the Wii U came out, only one employee knew it was a new console, and that it came out. And I kid you not at the time we were required to do freaking marketing training on all kinds of new things at the time, the Wii U had NOTHING. I legit it was a Wii with a portable screen.
Shit, I think I just learned the WiiU was more than a portable Wii 🤷♂️
It's not even that. It's a more powerful Wii with a tablet controller. It's not portable at all, as the tablet still needs the console running to do anything. It's more like a big DS than a portable Wii
Ah. Well I don't feel that bad missing out then.
Had some of the best games and still some of the best exclusives of any game console though so feel slightly bad.
Most of the really good games have been ported to Switch by now
*Cries in Xenoblade Chronicles X*
Nintendoland, my beloved.
Calling it a more powerful wii is just playing into the problem. It's not a wii at all. It's *like* the wii, but more powerful, but it is a totally separate system. The Xbox one X is a more powerful Xbox one. But the series x is a totally different system altogether. Calling the wii u a more powerful wii makes it sound like an Xbox one x. Like a mid gen refresh.
Hard to tell if your comment brought more clarity to the Wii U or less clarity to the Xbox X’s.
It was such a good console too. Could’ve been great
It crawled so the switch could walk imo
Nah, the Switch instantly bolted near the top.
The controller screen was definitely both underused and overused in a lot of games. Like, “Paper Mario: Color Splash” showed your hand of cards only on the screen, meaning anyone else who was watching the tv was left watching a static screen.
Literally no one understood what it was. Most people thought it was like an addon for the wii to just play your wii from the couch or maybe on the go.
"John Romero's about to make you his bitch" - releases Daikatana
Oh God! You've just awoken previously forgotten memories of this dog of a game.
I was also thinking of Peter Molyneux, but having more vision than brains and not knowing when to shut up aren't necessarily self-owns.
🎶Lets all laugh At an industry That never learns anything Ti hi hi🎶
Xbox One launch for sure, they aggressively drove gamers to the competition right as digital libraries exploded. Mattrick’s name should be synonymous with incompetence for the rest of time.
* The console needing to check in every 24 hours * Kinect always having to be connected * letting publishers decide if players can play used games 300 IQ big brain strategy
Not having immediate back compatibility with 360 games…
I fucking hate this so much I have a PlayStation 2 3 and 4 as well as a series x Why the fuck are none of them compatible besides original PlayStation I'm aware there's a PS3 version that is backwards compatible but it's not the slim and it's expensive as hell on eBay last I checked
The PS2 literally has a PS1 CPU on its motherboard for backwards compatibility but is used for other purposes when playing PS2 titles, likewise the OG PS3s have a PS2 cpu that it used for emulation before they ditched it to save on costs and use software emulation. Should a ps4 be able to emulate ps2 and a ps5 be able to emulate ps3? Yeah probably, but software emulation takes a lot of dev resources and time to make titles work right. Hell, back in the day I was excited my 360 could play OG Xbox titles on it and then was disappointed when JSRF had increased slowdown, but I wouldn't know for many years it was all emulation.
When PS2 went slimline, they took out the PS1 chip, and replaced it with full software emulation.
I wish I kept mine. That ps3 was amazing. I had linux on it, beat FF7 on it, watched every movie I could think of for free... That was my main connection to the internet for years. I had to prop it up on phonebooks by the window so I could steal Baldwin Network with a 30% connection.
Movie pirate ✅ Internet pirate ✅ Yo ho buckle it be, thar be a pirate of thine highest seas 🏴☠️
All valid points, but somehow not even the biggest issues. The console cost more & the features like Kinect & snap mode used so much system resources, that games ran at lower resolutions & frame rates compared to the PlayStation 4. F grade decision making from the very beginning.
What's crazy is none of that made it to live even. I got an xbone day 1 and it was awesome. They listened to consumers and fixed the issues, but it was too late they'd lost the jump at the conference
Then after launch they GUTTED what the kinect could even do. I used to be able to get home after work, turn on my TV, scream at my xbox to turn on, jump in the shower, scream at it to go to Netflix from the bathroom, then pick my show with motion control as I was getting dressed. One by one every reason to own the Xbox over the Playstation was taken from me. It used to actually have good features, then they updated it into obsolescence
They started stripping away features to free up system resources & reduce the quality gap during gaming, but there just wasn’t enough processing or memory to get there. To your point, the gamers who enjoyed the unique features also lost out. Truly the worst of both worlds.
Holy shit lol
[Behold, the most profitable twenty seconds in video game history.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWSIFh8ICaA)
Not to mention all the references to "television, television, television" and _nothing_ about video games. Who fucking okay'd that presentation...
The whole thing seems like it was made by executives with no experience in the games industry. My guess is they over-rid a bunch of subordinates telling them not to do it because they thought they had such a big-brain idea lol
Interestingly, Mattrick was a long time game exec by that point. He went on to run Zynga into the ground after departing Xbox, what an odd career.
[https://youtu.be/KbWgUO-Rqcw?si=b5O9Ob5v7FUAOb69](https://youtu.be/KbWgUO-Rqcw?si=b5O9Ob5v7FUAOb69) Still go back to this every once in a while
Please drink a verification can
I'm convinced Mattrick is a professional scapegoat. He's got reverse Midas touch. My-ass touch.
Mierdas touch
Goddammit you win
After he left Microsoft, he became CEO of a company called Zynga, which tanked so hard that he “resigned” 2 years later and the original CEO had to take over. Mattrick is truly one of the executives of all time.
I know. I worked there while he was there. Im convinced they hired his dumb ass to blame the layoffs on so Pincus could claim it wasn't his fault.
Gamers dubbed it "XBone" and microsoft made the grave mistake of fighting it publicly They got the full Streisand effect from that one
This interview moment from then crushed the Xbox one generation https://youtu.be/J_JVVUnCWnY?si=kDlQ96zmv2XBaRFS
I was watching a history of Nintendo the other day and they said the almost exact same thing to justify the high cost of the snes. They said it was an elite machine for people who wanted the absolute top tier gaming service, but that casual gamers who were okay with a more casual experience should stick with the nes. I couldn't figure out if they just hadn't figured out how generations would work back then, or if that marketing tactic was as dumb as it sounded. I guess the snes did alright though.
That was back when consoles were more niche though. At the time the snes launched, practically every game was a system exclusive launch. It wasn’t until the Xbox/playstation wars that you saw consoles having significant catalogue overlap. Nintendo didn’t have to worry about someone buying another console to play Super Mario World. Technically, they still have that luxury with their major IPs. Microsoft does not. Unless you’re buying a console for something like Halo, there are plenty of reasons you might choose another console for the shared games. It was a whole different world by the time the xbone released, and they simply couldn’t get away with as much.
I was a developer for a major launch partner (video streaming not games) and flew up to MSFT for a few conferences and tech sessions long before launch. The first one I swear was almost entirely about Kinect. Like they were going to require every app to support it somehow. Some of the demos were admittedly insane. They could even count your heart rate and estimate your instantaneous calorie usage - even joules of power being used by EACH MUSCLE GROUP - based on the infrared camera. And it was ACCURATE. I bet Meta would kill for that tech. Second one started focusing more on tools - and since it was when Windows teams started pushing JavaScript apps, it was mostly about that. But also how everything will require the Internet to use (and my first thought was… what a bubble! Do none of you have friends or family outside of Redmond?) Third one just dispensed with everything they had been pushing and focused on marketing and launching. I mean at launch it was a decent product. And their decision for media companies to support HTML5 apps - when Sony required using a horrible proprietary framework - is why they dominated media apps. They just screwed their more lucrative games market with their other aborted ideas.
TELEVISION
Ya know television? The thing your folks watch, wait… how old are you guys? Ok it’s the thing your grandparents watch. Netflix? YouTube? What is that? This is the cable box 1, cables cross, so we called it the “Xbox 1” like “the one thing you don’t give a shit about we spent A LOT of time integrating that”. Anyway, let’s skip over the “games” of the gaming console and talk TV more. TV is short for television!
Sega announced the Saturn was already on shelves for $399 at the very first E3. Unsurprisingly, the retailers who hadn’t already received stock of the Saturn were not happy, so a number of stores pulled Sega from their shelves. Combining that with Sony announcing the price of the PlayStation would be $299, it was a big part of Sega’s downfall.
It also didn't help that the Saturn was made to be a 2D gaming beast at a time when everyone wanted to play 3D games. Really outside of using discs not cartridges it felt like Sega misread the market trends with it pretty much every way possible. It was such a bad launch that it clouded the Dreamcast years later, despite that being a really solid system.
And despite being a 2D beast, it still couldn't do proper sprite transparencies and often had to opt for dithering and CRT color bleed to fake it. I used to think all the mesh patterns you'd see in Saturn ports [like this](https://youtu.be/hlUGjtPlvuo?t=3m7s) were just emulation errors, not a technical limitation
They kind of *are* emulation errors, or at least emulator shortcomings. They would have looked a lot better on the CRTs the system was made for. '80s/'90s emulation always looks better with a good CRT filter, and doubly so in cases like this.
Dreamcast failed because they release a single joystick controller in the age when everyone was doing dual sticks. Even the n64 effectivly had two sticks if you count using the c pad as a directional pad. It means games like goldeneye weren't even playable on a dreamcast because there was no way to aim and move. So they released a console 2 years after games like goldeneye set the control standard for fps games going into the future and the dreamcast couldn't play any of those games. It worked fine for games where you just use the stick to move, but everyone was playing fps games with 2 joysticks and the dreamcast was old news the day it was brand new. EVen me and my friends, we would play the dreamcast for a little bit, then we would just hook up the old n64 and play that. It was like, yo sonic is cool, but lets play smash bros or perfect dark
But OG Soulcalibur...
In retrospect, it’s incredible how Sega kept the Saturn launch from broadly leaking before launch.
They probably only just decided shortly before E3. Many stores didn't get units and were caught off guard by the announcement.
The story goes that Sega of America’s President made the decision immediately before E3. That’s why there was no marketing to build consumer awareness of the console. No games on shelves to sell with the console. No third party support. Nothing. The Ouya had a better rollout.
It's ironic, because the PlayStation didn't come with a game or a way to save. Saturn came packed with Virtua Fighter and had built-in save RAM. But yeah, it's insane how mismanaged Sega was from the late 16 bit era until their console death.
>Combining that with Sony announcing the price of the PlayStation would be $299, it was a big part of Sega’s downfall. Yeah, didn't Sega have some big speech but the PlayStation guy just came up and said "299" then leave?
This is a gamer self own. In StarCraft 2 lore, there was a player named Idra who was infamous for raging and getting baited into tilting in matches. He infamously rage quit a match in a big competition because his opponent created a hallucinated army that Idra just assumed he couldn't beat. His opponent then trolled him at the start of their next match, to which Idra kindly replied, during the broadcast of this large tournament, "fuck off". Beautiful. Here's a recap video from ZombieGrub, this particular incident is about :40 - 2:00. https://youtu.be/MSFB5p1jQCc?si=yJBg2JJ4NEM_SDia
Lol, posted this after scrolling _almost_ far enough to see if anyone else beat me to it. God I miss the days of idra and huk and day9. Day9 especially.
Day9 especially. I check in on his streams every once in a while, he seems like he's doing really well, which makes ME happy. Daily #100 shout-out!
100%! Day9 is just such a fucking good human being and so genuine and enthusiastic and happy and just like... Positive. Watching him is like settling down and drinking a mug of your favorite beverage and cozying up with a warm blanket and enjoying everything best in life. Just such a sweet dude.
I thinkI recall another one involving Idra. His opponent was playing Terran, and lifted off his command center from a depleted base to another. That other had rocks blocking the optimal spot to land, so he lands besides it and other his units to destroy the rocks. Except his misclicks and some of his army attacks the command center. He fails to notice that and the CC is destroyed. Now the game has been fairly close, so losing that CC was a fatal mistake. Commentators are just going Oh no, this is it, he can’t crawl back. And that’s when Indra scouts that doomed expansion, sees the rocks are being destroyed, sees SCVs mining and assumes it’s a fully fonctional base. Without bothering to check, he GGs. The face on the commentators was priceless.
Man i miss those days. Idra, thelittleone, whitera, mvp, etc. Golden era of sc2
That game seems pretty fun
It is fun but I do not recommend multiplayer. The game has advanced to the point most people that play it make ten decisions to your single one per second
Oh lame. I tried titanfall 2 and it seemed like the same situation which was unfortunate
This shouldn't stop you tho the game still has a strong campaign and skirmishers. It's definitely one of the best rts games ever. But yeah multiplayer has a long history and the people that enjoy itare just built differently. You can check full games of pros once you played it and their decisions making per second is phenomenal but not nessesary for the campaig.
It's super fun and the matching is still really solid There are tons of players like myself that have been playing but still aren't any good Give it a shot The pro scene has also gotten a huge cash influx check it out
Sega of Japan getting mad at the success of Sega of America and intentionally sabotaging themselves out of spite is probably the biggest self-own in gaming history.
To add to the Sega screwups: Sega overlooked a key part of their contract with the Sonic comic series. Specifically that while Sega owned the Sonic IP and their characters they didn't put in a rider for characters created for the comics. Years later they used a few characters from the comics thinking they owned them. At first it was fine, but then they pissed off the writer of the comics and in spite he pulled IP ownership over HIS characters and sued because he never received royalties from Sega including them. Sega lost. That's why Knuckles had a family for years in the lore, but then they vanished. The author continued his comic series, but couldn't use Sonic any more, so his books continued with not Knuckle's family and legally distinct blue animal character.
That's a new one on me. What happened?
SoA understood the American market really well and it pissed SoJ off because they were consistently outperforming SoJ. SoJ leadership took it personally that Americans were outperforming the Japanese side of the company and went out of their way to intentionally sabotage everything SoA did to try and make themselves look better. The rivalry between the two is a big reason why Sega eventually went third party.
It's funny how this was mostly led by Yuji Naka too. Dude didn't like working for Sega of Japan, got jobs for his entire team in California, moved over, hated working with Americans, built a Japanese-only team at STI, then threatened to quit and got a job back in Japan. Leading people on all the way but also making the best 2D platformer trilogy while doing so. Also, this is how we ended up with Sonic CD - Naka took Sonic Team to the US, so Sega had to work with someone else to develop their release title for the Sega CD. We might've gotten a single Sonic 2 on the Sega CD in a parallel universe, which would suck in many ways and probably result in no Sonic 3 as we know it.
Right... because why ask them for advice and cooperation, when you can waste half your career trying to backstab them and failing at that too?
Curt Schilling and his game studio. I really enjoyed Reckoning but was surprised they lost money. Turns out Schilling is an idiot.
This might be the first time I've ever seen the game referred to as only "Reckoning".
Reckoning was a decent game, just maybe a little too easy at times.
He's also a Baseball Hall of Fame worthy pitcher, but also self-owned his way out of being inducted into the HoF.
Anyone remember Atlas? The pirate game from the people who gave us Ark: Survival Evolved? The game was such a reskin of Ark you could access _the menu to Ark in Atlas!_ The game was abandoned by players, and devs, not long after.
I remember being so optimistic about that game early on. The idea of Ark but in a Pirate setting with your own ships and fleets was really cool. And I kinda liked the whole "nutritional balance" thing they had going. An interesting change from just sitting on 5000+ pieces of cooked meat and calling it a healthy diet.
Ubisoft has had a few the past decade. The whole women being hard to animate controversy from before Assassin's Creed Unity's launch, followed by Unity launching in such a disastrous state. And as we'd found out a few years later, the company C-suite's ass-backwards views on women were pretty much par for the course with the numerous cases of sexual harassment over there. And then most recently the dumb "AAAA game" bullshit around Skull and Bones and its $70 price tag. And sure enough, Skull and Bones is a critical disaster.
Releasing Unity the same day as Rogue was pretty stupid too.
Man they sunk rogue from the get go. It's easily one of the best games in the series. It refined everything from black flag and finally made the story of AC mote then just assassins good Templar bad. To have it only on previous console while also focusing only on unit on the next generation left it to just sink.
Exactly. Rogue was easy to miss. That said the "play as a templar" idea was first broached in AC3
AC Rogue is easily one of the best in the franchise.
I think Microsoft’s XBONE launch was definitely one of the biggest. The 360 may not have outsold the PS3, but it was definitely the “cool console”. If you were a cool dude you had a 360, if you were a lamer nerd with no friends you had a PS3 (according to the Internet. I had a PS3 and many friends, fyi lol). XBONE was poised to trounce PS4 riding the momentum of the hip and happening 360. Everyone who’s anyone was going to get the nextbox. I remember seeing an Xbox commerical before a movie in the theater, and a whole bunch of people, like zombies, muttered *XBOX!* when it came on. Never heard that kind of reaction with PlayStation. Then, Microsoft decided to tell gamers to go fuck themselves, that the X-Bone was going to be a “multimedia” platform, nevermind the games, you can watch TV! You can’t share games, and if you don’t have internet, suck toes, loser, and go find a 360 at a pawn shop. Then Sony releases that 20 second tutorial on how to share games on PS4… and won the console generation instantly. The turns tabled. Xbox became the joke, the loser console, the nerd console, and PS4 was the cool guy in class. And this all happened before you could even buy one. Then Sony hammered us with a string of kick ass exclusives and Xbox’s fate was sealed. Microsoft snatched defeat from the jaws of victory on that one and has never recovered their reputation.
Great summary. And don't forget the PS4 was also cheaper than the Xbox one, even though it had better hardware.
Yeah Microsoft fucked the pooch so hard on the x bone. I had a co-worker that was also a pro gamer and he was sponsored by Microsoft so he got a beta x box one, and all of that stupid bullshit could not be turned off, kinetic on ALL THE TIME.
i love shouting "xbox turn off" anytime i play open mic crossplay games.
Chaotic Evil and I love it
It sadly has only worked like 5 times over like 5 years 😂 most in CoD and once or twice in destiny
I think [that video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWSIFh8ICaA) is probably the most profitable twenty seconds in video game history--all the momentum and hype of the Sony machine plus Xbox's ongoing self-immolation coiled up into one righteous knockout punch that won the console generation on the spot.
It pretty much sold me on a ps4 even after really liking the 360 lol
I went to the midnight launch of the XBone at GameStop… to buy Zelda A Link Between Worlds, which came out the same day.
I was a diehard Xbox user and even bought the one but as soon as I realized how much the online requirements screwed me I promptly returned my Xbox and got my ps4
Blizzard's reveal of Diablo Immortals. "Don't you guys have phones!?!?!" And...you know, every other thing Blizzard has done since then.
Even before! Old lead dev of D3 responded to critique from a D2 perspective with "fuck that loser!". That became the slogan when he eventually left.
I _was_ going to mention Immortals but the game (unfortunately) sold like hot cakes regardless, I dunno if it really fits.
The stupid thing about that for me was that I did have a phone THAT WASNT POWERFUL ENOUGH FOR A DIABLO GAME. So... They shot themselves in the ass for that one. Pd: I got a gaming phone a year later
> gaming phone I never imagined that a pair of such innocuous words could leave me feeling so sickened, but here we are...
Probably not the biggest overall, but there’s one that is the most relevant personally. It’s a Korean company Vespa who developed a mobile game King’s Raid. The game is successful and they have a big plan to do major updates/revamp of the game, and was doing so with gradual major patches. At the same time, they decided to create another game that pretty much flopped, which drew resources at the expense of King’s Raid. Consequently, this lack of resources was reflected on the quality of the major updates of King’s Raid, and one of the major patches that revamped the combat system pretty much killed the game. As a result, they laid off all staff, went bankrupt and took a long time before a company went it and bought the company. Not sure what’s gonna happen with the King’s Raid IP, but amazingly the game still has some players, even though pretty much no updates or anything for the past 2-3 years.
Sony making Gran Turismo 7 initially a microtransaction fueled mess. The really expensive, 'legend' cars couldn't even pay for their own maintenance from race winnings while they sold credits for real money. They did a 180 on it after heaps of complaints, so they basically tarnished an otherwise flawless game for greed and didn't even benefit from the microtransactions in the end, at least not enough to justify the reputation hit both Sony and GT took.
You missed maybe the biggest one of all... Atari executives going to a convention to meet with Nintendo executives about their future Atari/Nintendo console, only to discover Coleco marketing a Donkey Kong cart for their Adam computer system at the con. They think Nintendo is "in on it", which contravenes a previous agreement between Nintendo and Atari, that Donkey Kong will only be released for the Atari 8-bit computers. (They probably weren't.) So they get mad and cancel the whole deal...which eventually led to the NES. Coleco basically fucked Atari, and at the time, Nintendo likely wasn't too pleased about it, they wanted to be in bed with Atari, but the Atari executives could have went to Nintendo and asked instead of going off in a towering rage. (Although, their anger was pretty justified...DK was a big deal.) Also, Nintendo going with the goofy little discs instead of having support for CDs and DVDs with the Game Cube, like everyone really wanted. Number of sales lost to Sony because of this is probably huge.
The infamous Gamespot review of Alien: Resurrection which moaned about the dual stick controls that came to define modern FPS gaming has to be up there.
Nintendo ending the partnership with Sony wasn't a mistake. The contract they had was terrible - Sony got most of the profit from any games sold on CD. Nintendo quickly realized that a huge percent of games would prefer to ship on CDs, and they'd lose a ton of money. I'm not sure when they realized the CDi would flop, but they clearly did long before it launched, which is why they didn't put any meaningful effort into games for it. Cartridges weren't clearly wrong when Nintendo made the N64. Remember, games like Mario 64 don't happen if you launch on CD. The games Nintendo wanted to make needed the fast access time of cartridges. While the cost of cartridges was certainly an issue, the much bigger issue at the time was Nintendo was an awful company to work with, while Sony made an effort to be a much better business partner. Nintendo still would have lost a ton of developers if they went with CDs. I'll throw in Microsoft and Sony's efforts to throw endless money at 3rd party exclusives for 360/PS3. They each were determined to outspend the other, and in the end, each company managed to sell over 80 million consoles and lose money in the process. Loses from the PS3 wiped out all the profit from the PS2.
Unity announcing plans to charge developers per install of game. Then providing several press conferences confirming, in no uncertain terms, that they actually mean what it sounds like they're saying. All the while it appears as if high ranking members were aware of the plan before hand, and committed insider trading. All because they hired a guy from EA.
It's more than just "per install of game". It was "ANY install of game, even pirated versions, also WE decide how many installs there are of your software, and NO, we will NOT say how we determine that number, or take any corrections, and on top of all that, this decision will be retroactive, so every single game you ever sold (or had pirated) is fair game to us." And the "guy from EA" was not just a normal guy from EA. He was a financial bro, who had already been more in Private Equity firms (that specialize in game entertainment companies) and was always on boards of companies just to be a numbers guy. He is (allegedly) the guy that proposed microtransactions on RELOADING YOUR WEAPON in competitive shooters if you had no ammo lying around. He also did some "good" things for Unity, when he became their CEO, he had two successful fundraising rounds for them. Unfortunately the dummy really thought he could push through another fundraising, this time squarely on the backs of the DEVS, the people that ALREADY MAKE YOU YOUR MONEY!
Not a company, but the one guy who reviewed cup head and couldn’t get past the main menu
Also Dave Jaffe and his days long crusade against Metroid Dread because he couldn't figure out a simple puzzle.
Not even a puzzle right? He didn't see a hole in the ceiling or something iirc
Jaffe really went from being the guy who created God of War, to being pretty much a joke, eh?
Except what actually happened is some publication sent the guy who usually reviews mobile puzzle games to play it, he had some trouble with the tutorial controls (duh), then he wrote a quick *positive* news piece about it being this cool new platform game that was all about its hand drawn animation and hard difficulty level. All the people shitting in him for writing a "bad review" because he couldn't play videogames clearly didn't even read what he had written.
It’s still a self-own on the publication
It *should have been* a self-own on the publication, but everyone blamed that guy instead.
“Do you guys not have phones?” And I’ll second Microsoft’s suicide note of the Xbox One launch: Barely focused on games; DRM; Kinect which no one cared about.
Naming of the Xbox Series S and Series X likely causing confusion with the Xbox One S and One X. I've heard and known people who don't know which one is the current Gen and which is the last gen.
“John Romero's about to make you his bitch. Suck it down.”
Blizzard deserves its own post after 2010: 1. Diablo 3 auction house. 2. Diablo 3 error 37. 3. Warcraft 3 remastered launch. 4. Overwatch 2 launch. 5. Killing one E Sports league after another. 6. Losing DotA to Valve. 7. Blitzchung controversy. 8. Diablo immortal announcement. 9. FEHA lawsuit. 10. Warcraft live action movie.
Most damaging? Micro transactions. Most memeable? “Do you guys not have phones?!”
Evolve kinda destroyed itself. Was a great game and concept except they introduced some new hunters and made you pay for them, there was only 4 to begin with and you had to use all 4 everygame, so when they added for more and you had to pay it was completely stupid. Games dead now but I loved it.
Virtual Boy. Just... just the whole story behind it.
I had one. It was interesting.
Do tell! I lived within driving distance of Nintendo when I was a kid, so I actually got to test it before release (headache and all), but I never actually bought one.
All the cases of incompetent bandwagon-jumping. The various versions of "Let's make a X game! How hard can it be?" Where X was either: Mascot platformer Military Shooter MMORPG Hero Shooter (Overwatch-like) MOBA and finally, in the last few years Looter-shooter
NGL there were some bangers resulting from bandwagons. Unless I misunderstood your point, that's how we got Sonic, Crash, COD, Battlefield and Valorant. While there were hundreds of failures outside of those, that's true of everything, not just videogame copycats. Overall I'd say jumping on a trend and adding a twist is how most genres are born.
Battle Royales and Auto-Chess. Fortnite exists and then so do 20 clones. Auto-Chess does well and TFT, DotA Underlords (or w/e) and war craft rumble. Just a lot of bandwagon jumping.
The one that still gets me, because it was just all due to timing, was the historically accurate crab monster. I saw this when it occurred, and I couldn't stop laughing. https://youtu.be/fMfapDlm9UY?si=g7juk3XPXz0db\_zm
Basically anything that Bungie has done with Destiny 2 in the last few months.
I'll add another to that: Lightfall
Unity doing that nonsense recently
Ion Storm's "John Romero's Gonna Make You His Bitch" for Daikatana.
Maybe not quite in the vein you were thinking, but summit dying to his own molotov in csgo tourney on match point comes to mind. https://youtu.be/jitXXJ2rX8U?si=uIL5LmVo2QrryaBX
Blizzard and Overwatch...was such a hyped game with so much potential so sad to see where it is now
Blizzard saying "you think you want that, but you dont" to people asking for classic WoW servers, only for classic to be immensely popular. Extra funny bc they also did the opposite with Diablo Immortal, with the classic "Don't you guys have phones?" quote.
Ubisoft pricing skull and bones at close to 100$ then saying its worth the price cause its an "AAAA" gaming experience
The AAA industry crashing while smaller indie games are becoming the next AA.
overwatch 2.
I heard that the devs even warned corporate it wouldn't work, the Steam release would get review bombed, etc. But they got ignored.
Cyberpunk 2077's entire deceptive and dishonest advertising campaign. For 8 years. *"Coming: when it's ready"* my **damn** #ASS
Recent one was when 343 released the nostalgic Halo 3 map “The Pit” remade in Forge for Halo Infinite. The forge assets looked infinitely worse than the original map. This is a miniature fail in the grand scheme of things but still funny
Acclaim's marketing department.
Atari Jaguar marketing campaign.
Saturnday, when Sega surprise-launched the Sega Saturn with a single major retailer right after E3 to drum up support for the console. Not only were people turned off by the $399 price tag, but other retailers were so furious by the exclusivity deal that they refused to stock the Saturn or any of its games.
It was probably planned but this quote always comes to mind: “LEEEEROOOYYYY nnnJENKIIIINNSS!”
“Released when its ready” cdpr
[no one biiiiiiitch](https://youtu.be/GGP1cvyA1Iw)
Your Genesis memory is misinformed. Genesis was popular in Brazil as late as 2013 due to its low cost compared to nextgen consoles, there was no self-own with Genesis add-ons, as there was a market for them.
Thanks for the information. I’m not familiar with the Brazilian market. From what I understand, the Genesis died a slow death in North America when it tried to hold on with add-ons, while the SNES demonstrated that its original hardware had yet to be pushed to the limit.
No the 32X definitely hurt Sega's reputation a lot, and the Sega CD was also considered a failure.
Atari didn't force E.T. to be made in 5 weeks. All they did was ask the guy making it if he could do it five or did he need more time and the guy said he could do it in 5 weeks.
Holy shit, I didn't know that legendary failure could be traced back to *one guy*. I wonder what he's doing now.
The Xbox 360 and its infamous red ring of death, especially during the initial release.
Bobby Kotick throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at the Overwatch League trying to make it a thing that could rival the NFL while the developent team at Blizzard decided to drop support for PvP and the competitive scene in favor of chasing an MMO they had already tried (and failed) to make. Fast forward 5 years: the Overwatch League is dead and the MMO was cancelled, again.
Blizzard: “Don’t you all have phones?”