Nobody’s perfect, including game developers. There’s been plenty of occasions when game
developers have messed up and disappointed fans (or engaged others) thanks to mistakes
they’ve made when creating certain titles. So today, we’re taking a closer look at
these messes in the industry with our list of the top 10 game developer mistakes you
won’t believe. We’ll be talking about game developers who have goofed big time,
either with the games themselves or with their staff and the way they’re companies have
struggled with those poor decisions. So with that in mind, let's get to it!
10 Telltale - Employer of the Year Oh I love a good sarcastic jab. Telltale Games,
who earlier this decade had one hell of a run with some pretty stellar series, including
the Walking Dead, had a tragic unravelling in 2018. Employees were brought into a conference
room on September 21st of that year, and told that the company was closing thanks to major
financial struggles. The worst part? None of the employees were getting severance, and
their health insurance bonus? They had 9 days left to use it before it expired. To make
matters worse, they were then kicked out of the building 30 minutes after the meeting
in order to avoid being hit by liquidators further. 250 employees were laid off, some
of which had just started working for the company that very week. While the company
managed to organize a deal with another developer to finish the Walking Dead, they also got
hit with a lawsuit by a former employee for violating labour laws. Yikes.
9 Metal Gear Defamation Once upon a time, in the year 2015, a neurosurgeon
the name of Sergio Canavero claimed he would be the first doctor ever to pull off a human
head transplant. He claimed to have conducted a successful surgery in 2017, although his
claims were never confirmed. What does this have to do with video games? Well, in the
trailer for Metal Gear solid V The Phantom Pain, a doctor who looked a whole hell of
a lot like our pal Sergio appeared. Digging further, fans discovered that there were other
narrative connections in the game to the real life aspects of Canavero’s career. Despite
all of this, the character in the game was modeled after actor Ian Moore, who also shares
an uncanny resemblance to the doctor (sort of. They’re mainly both just bald white
men). That didn’t stop Canavero from publically flirting with the idea of suing Hideo Kojima
over this.
8 Xbox One goof Let’s move away from individual developers
and take a look at a publisher (but also technically a developer). We’re talking Microsoft, and
the controversy that went on with their Xbox One system. When the system first came out,
Microsoft was overly ambitious. They wanted the Xbox One to be an all in one machine that
could not only play games, but control your TV, record programs, and respond to your voice
commands. In order to do this, the console needed a mandatory online server check every
24 hours, and in addition to that, it wouldn’t play pre-owned games without authorization,
which sometimes took up to weeks. It was a PR nightmare, and Sony had a field day over
it. Eventually, Microsoft had to reverse a lot of these decisions, but it still took
until 2016, three years after launch, to really fix these issues.
7 Kickstarter money In 2013, designer Peter Molyneux and indie
developer 22Cans created a title called Godus, a title that falls into the god game genre,
if it’s title didn’t give that away. It’s the spiritual successor to Molyneux’s previous
title Populous, and in order to get it made, a Kickstarter was created, which amassed $500,000.
But after that, the game slipped into development hell. For a long time, there was no word on
how far along the development of the title had gone, or where all of that money had gone.
The game continues to remain in early access, and there hasn’t been an updated beta, with
the title being adapted into a mobile touch game that pissed a lot of people off. Most
of the reviews on Steam are scathing, and overwhelmingly negative. Most players just
want to see the game finished. Others are pissed that they wasted their money on a project
that went no where. So what happened to all that money? Did Molyneux just walk away
with it? And, to make things even more awkward, Molyneux was asked in a recent interview concerning
another failed game of his (Rock Paper Shotgun) whether or not he was a pathological liar.
Yikes. 6 Red Dead 2
Compared to Telltale Games, developers like the Rockstar games are significantly larger
in size, and therefore, you’d think would have a better grip on how certain workplace
conditions were overseen and maintained. Right? Apparently not. Rockstar made some controversial
headlines after the release of Red Dead Redemption 2 - and not the kinds of controversial headlines
the company is used to. Dan Houser of Rockstar had openly bragged to the press that the team
who worked on the title worked 100 hour weeks in order to finish the game in time for its
launch. As you can imagine, that didn’t go over too well. It launched a bunch of exposes
into their company and employee working conditions. According to interviews, working overtime
was considered mandatory, and many said they felt pressured to stay at the office at night
and come in on weekends if they wanted to succeed in the company. Some even said the
company fosters a culture of fear, with employees staying anonymous in these interviews with
fear that they would be sued or suffer other kinds of retaliation for speaking out. And,
apparently, employees who worked less than 60 hours a week while GTA V was in development
had the word ‘under’ scrawled on their employee records in red marker. Yikes. And
if you left the company before a game was released and weren’t there to see it through
to the end, your name would be removed from the games’ credits.
5 No Man’s Sky No Man’s Sky was one of the most highly
anticipated games of 2016. It was majorly hyped, and gamers expected a whole lot from
the title. But then, when it came out, it was hit with a massive amount of disappointment.
The developers, Hello Games, were trashed with negative reviews, with players being
disappointed by the game’s procedural generation and the small scope of the title overall.
The marketing had strongly promised otherwise. Multiplayer capabilities were also absent
from the title. Luckily, the development team made it through the swamp of criticism, later
releasing updates, patches and DLCs that drastically altered the game, finally giving players the
game that they had initially anticipated when it was originally released. Needless to say,
it’s a great game now, but the controversy surely hindered a lot of its success moving
forward.
4 Sonic is stealing your data Sega used to be a noble company. But in more
recent years, or the last decade and a half, rather, the company has taken a bit of a reputation
hit, from not only pumping out poor quality Sonic games, but also pulling some real sketchy
sh*t. Case in point, in 2018, when a security company called Pradeo discovered that Sega’s
mobile android games (Sonic Dash, Sonic the Hedgehog Classic, and Sonic Dash 2: Sonic
Boom) were all leaking user location data and device info. They had estimated that these
leaks could impact anywhere between 120 million and 600 million users. Yeeeeep.
3 Pokemon Go is Racist When Pokemon Go came out, developer Niantic
got a lot of heat over issues with the AR game. Players were trespassing, walking into
traffic and getting themselves into difficult situations, which led to some major controversy
and developers having to adjust and create restrictions in the game. Players were walking
into historical sites, like concentration camp remains, trying to catch Pokemon. While
Niantic was able to fix most of the issues concerning that, they weren’t able to shake
the controversy surrounding another scandalous issue. Certain neighbourhoods that were considered
black neighbourhoods lacked pokestops. This was because the developer essentially grafted
in game locations onto crowdsourced data, like the Historical Marker Database, which
largely overlooked certain neighbourhoods and demographics. In other words, Pokemon
Go suffered the consequences of systemic racism.
2 EA & Star Wars Battlefront II Oh boy. If you’re unfamiliar with what went
down with EA Games and Star Wars Battlefront 2, you missed one hell of a scandal. It’s
perhaps one of the biggest developer flubs of recent years, and it was just spectacular
how badly the company dealt with the situation. In 2017, EA released the follow up to Star
Wars Battlefront, a title that was expected to fix the issues with its predecessor, which
was criticized for being ‘thin on content’. But then, EA brought loot boxes into the game.
Yep. That drastically changed the landscape of it, riddling it with microtransactions
that vastly changed how well you could do in that title. It was pay to play, with many
of the characters and features that players were buying the title for having to be unlocked
with a ridiculous amount of grinding, or by paying for microtransactions that gave you
an upper hand in the game. Some even called it a form of gambling. EA would go on to make
changes, including a handful of mistakes that they also had to revise, finally making the
game’s lootboxes focused on cosmetics rather than items and characters and what have you
that made you more powerful in the game. But a little too late, isn’t it? The controversy
is way more detailed than what we described in our video, so we recommend visiting kotaku’s
website to get the full lowdown on all of the craziness that occurred with that game’s
release and post release updates. But, to give you some more context, EA was also announced
to be a finalist in the Consumerist’s Worst Company in America poll, so there you go.
1 Atari and ET almost destroyed the gaming industry
This is perhaps one of my favourite video game tales of all time. Back in 1982, Atari
was commissioned to adapt Spielberg’s heart wrenching sci fi blockbuster, ET for the Atari
2600. But in order to get it out for the holiday season, the game was expedited and rushed,
making it one of the most confusing, disorienting and poorly done titles in the history of the
industry. And the game didn’t sell. Thanks to the overproduction and returns, millions
of unsold cartridges were kicking around, and, inevitably, buried in a landfill in New
Mexico. Specifically, 728,000 cartridges of Atari unsold games were buried in that landfill;
an urban myth that was confirmed to be true in 2014. Here’s the thing though; because
of that commercial failure, the video game industry floundered, and the value of Atari’s
revenue forecasts dropped from a 50 percent increase in 1981 to a 15 percent increase,
and Warner Communications lost 1.3 billion dollars in market valuation thanks to this
event causing their stock to drop. Other video game developers and manufacturers also suffered
and the industry massively declined (until Nintendo stepped in and revitalized the industry).
And hey, nearly destroying the video game industry is not a goof up that any developer
would want on their hands, that’s for sure.