Top Ten Video Game Disasters in History

[Bullstomp]

http://metro.co.uk/2013/06/21/the-10-greatest-disasters-in-video-games-history-from-xbone-to-e-t-3850551/

 

Congratz to M$ for getting 2nd and 5th place!

 

The 10 greatest disasters in video games history – from Xbone to E.T.

 

By Roger Hargreaves Friday 21 Jun 2013 1:00 am

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Xbox One – only the second worst console unveil in history

GameCentral names the video game scandals that brought companies to their knees, destroyed reputations, and almost crashed the entire industry…

When the games industry messes up it doesn’t usually do things by halves. Despite the genius of the people creating games the marketing and business men behind your favourite titles are seldom quite so gifted.

But there are some mistakes that make the furore over Mass Effect 3’s ending or Aliens: Colonial Marines’ developer seem like a storm in a virtual teacup. In fact some even manage to make the debacle over the Xbox One’s unveiling seem like minor mistakes…

And March was one of the better months too…

10. Wii U release schedule
You could easily title this as post-2008 Nintendo, as ever since that year’s empty Christmas release schedule the company seems to have been paralysed by an inexplicable ability to release new games. This not only saw the Wii die on the vine, for no very good reason, but it also meant weak launch line-ups for the 3DS and Wii U – and even more barren release schedules thereafter. The 3DS has since recovered, in what is one of gaming’s great comebacks, but the fate of the Wii U is still yet to be decided. Although the line-up of games at E3 last week was certainly a step in the right direction.

How and why Nintendo got themselves into this position though has no answer. The Wii has been the best-selling console of this generation and Nintendo is known to have billions of dollars in its war chest. But rather than expanding and putting out even more games than usual it did the exact opposite, while slashing its marketing budget for its new consoles. As a result it’s now in a more precarious position than ever before in its history, and current president Satoru Iwata is fearing for his job.

9. PlayStation Network hack
There have been a rash of high profile hacking scandals in recent years, some involving companies even bigger than Sony, but few were handled with such doddering incompetence as the PlayStation Network outage of 2011. It took days before Sony even admitted there was a problem and then it quietly revealed that the personal details of around 77 million users had been stolen, many without any kind of encryption protection.

Although the attacks started on April 17 it was the 20th before Sony decided to turn off the PlayStation Network entirely, promising that it would be back within a week. The outage lasted 24 days, meaning no one could play online or access the PlayStation Store during that time. To this day it remains the biggest hacking scandal of any consumer-facing company and led to interventions by a number of different governments and several lawsuits. Luckily for Sony though there were no confirmed cases of credit card fraud and most of the culprits were eventually caught.

SimCity – disaster struck

8. SimCity launch
The only game on this list, and for good reason as it’s done more than almost any other software or hardware to discredit DRM (digital rights management) and always-online. Although previous games in the series had been primarily single-player affairs the 2013 reboot of SimCity demanded a constant (or at least every 20 minutes) online connection before it would even work. EA claimed this was because of cloud-processing requirements, although hackers quickly found out this wasn’t true and that the online check-ins could be turned off with ease if EA wanted to.

As if that wasn’t bad enough the game was plagued by problems at launch, with players unable to login to the servers and therefore unable to play the game – even if they just wanted to do so on their own. Network outages persisted, saved games were constantly lost, and EA had to endure weeks of bad press. The game underneath was actually okay but the size of the city areas was much smaller than previous games and much of the artificial intelligence was completely broken.

The whole debacle was so damaging that when EA later announced a new sequel to sister series The Sims the press release went out of its way to promise a ‘single-player offline experience’.

7. PlayStation media briefing E3 2006
The press conference that launched a thousand memes, but as widely mocked as the reveal of the PlayStation 3 was it’s only the third worst on our list. The giant enemy crabs and ‘Ridgggee Raccccccerrrrrr!’ quotes still live on today but Sony’s real problem was announcing the more expensive of the two PlayStation 3 models for $599. At the time that didn’t seem that unreasonable to European gamers, who are used to paying extortionate amounts for their hardware, but it instantly made Sony a laughing stock amongst price conscious American gamers.

Things got even worse when PlayStation granddaddy Ken ‘Krazy’ Kutaragi got into full flow, suggesting people should take two jobs in order to be able to afford the PlayStation 3 (after a few months Kutaragi was quietly pensioned off with a golden handshake). Together with a weak launch line-up of games the PlayStation 3 never really recovered its position in the U.S., despite proving much more popular in Europe and Asia. When PlayStation Europe boss Jim Ryan talks about Sony having ‘learnt our lessons from the PS3’ it’s the mistakes of E3 2006 he’s referring to.

6. Mega CD and 32X
The SNES might have won out worldwide during the 16-bit generation, but the Mega Drive was always king in the UK during the ‘90s. And the only reason it didn’t win overall is because of Sega’s bizarre hardware plans near the end of its lifetime. The Saturn was meant to be the Mega Drive’s next generation replacement, but although it was enduring a troubled development the Nintendo 64 was also nowhere near finished – so there was no real rush. If Sega had only stayed the course, supporting the Mega Drive properly until its natural demise, the current shape of the games industry might be very different.

But they didn’t. Instead they released two highly expensive Mega Drive add-ons that had hardly any decent games and which badly stretched Sega’s resources – not to mention souring the public on the entire brand. The Mega CD was embarrassingly low tech even at the time but the benefits of the 32X, which was supposed to increase the power of the Mega Drive and make it better at 3D graphics, was even less obvious. The improvements were negligible at best and the whole business was the beginning of the end for Sega…

5. Xbox One unveil
Still making headlines as we speak the unveiling of the Xbox One has been an unmitigated disaster, despite a very decent line-up of new games and intense anticipation by fans.

The strangest thing about the whole affair is that so many of the problems were needlessly self-inflicted, and stem from exec interviews that never seemed to tell the same story twice. The unveil itself was a dull but competently executed affair that focused on the Xbox One’s multimedia features. But as the day wore on bizarre stories began to emerge that the Xbox One needed to check-in online once every 24 hours and that it blocked the use of second-hand games, and even lending them to a friend.

None of this was mentioned in the unveiling and as the news trickled out and execs tried to put a positive spin on it the fans began to revolt. By the time it got to E3 (where Microsoft again failed to mention anything at all about the matter) Sony took full advantage and revealed that the PlayStation 4 would have no such restrictions. And then just a few days later Microsoft was forced into a complete U-turn, leaving the Xbox One to start again from scratch just weeks after it had first been announced.

Very physical media

4. Nintendo 64 cartridges
As is well known the original PlayStation started life as an add-on for the SNES, similar in concept to the Mega CD. It was to be a straight collaboration between Sony and Nintendo, but when Nintendo saw the small print in the contract they famously backed out at the last minute – living Sony to go it alone. You could consider that a disaster in itself but Nintendo lived on and the subsequent Nintendo 64 console actually went on to be more profitable than the PS one.

But Nintendo’s great mistake was that the N64 used cartridges instead of CDs, something that immediately alienated third parties and set the company down its current path of relying solely on its own internally made games. Cartridges did allow for faster loading but Nintendo’s real infatuation with them was that they could charge other publishers more for manufacturing them, and so their greed left them with an outdated format and an increasingly unbalanced games portfolio.

The Nintendo 64 may have done well anyway but all the current problems with third party support today, including on the Wii U, can be traced backed to that one fateful decision.

3. Sega Saturn unveil
Looking through this list it makes it obviouus just how bad video games companies are at unveiling their new products. Even ultimately successful consoles have had to endure terrible starts and none has ever fared worse than the Saturn. The problems started even before it went public, with Sega ditching the original hardware design, which was meant to focus on 2D graphics, once they found out that the PS one was selling itself on its 3D polygonal power.

The entire console was a rush job but Sega made the worst of a bad situation when it attended the first ever E3 in 1995. It had been pretending it would launch the console on ‘Saturnday’ September 2, a date which gamers, retailers, and third party publishers had been preparing for. At E3 though this was revealed as a trick to force Sony’s hand and that the Saturn was actually being released at that very moment in May. Only four American retailers where in on the secret and this infuriated everyone else.

Not only that but the technically inferior Saturn was $100 more expensive than the PS one and it had only six games available at launch – all of which were from Sega since other publishers also expected it to be released in September. Although quite successful in Japan the Saturn was essentially dead the moment it was announced in the West and Sega never recovered. As a result of the Saturn’s failure they never had the money to make a success of the subsequent, and much better thought out, Dreamcast and they exited the hardware business in 2001.

Red means danger

2. Red ring of death
The Xbox One fiasco is not the first time that Microsoft has tried to ride out a wave of unpopularity by simply pretending the problem doesn’t exist. But with the Red Ring of Death (RROD) it succeeded. Rushed into completion in order to get a head start over the PlayStation 3, the original models of the Xbox 360 are estimated to have had a failure rate of between 30 to 45 per cent. An astonishingly high rate but only an estimate because Microsoft has barely ever acknowledged the problem.

Their accountants did though, with the cost of replacing and repairing consoles costing the company over $1 billion. Many customers reported replacing Xbox 360s five times or more, with Microsoft paying for couriers to arrive with specially designed cardboard boxes to transport them in – which quickly became known as Xbox coffins. Microsoft never said exactly what the problem was but the read ring of lights around the Xbox 360’s start button became a sadly familiar sight amongst gamers (we lost three that way ourselves).

Perhaps more nefarious than Microsoft’s attitude to the problem though was how underreported it was in the mainstream media, with the much less prevalent issue of disc scratching somehow getting much more coverage. As a result Microsoft got away with a launch where for the first year or so its console simply didn’t work in any reliable fashion. The fact that gamers didn’t seem to care and they got away with it scot-free (except for the $1 billion repair bill) is undoubtedly what led to their later bullishness over the Xbox One’s anti-consumer features.

1. The video game crash of 1983
No matter how many mistakes they make modern consoles still have a way (but perhaps not a long way) to go before they bring down the entire industry. But that’s exactly what happened in 1983 when an influx of expensive but low quality games for a multitude of competing consoles flooded North America and effectively destroyed the entire video game market in the US. The E.T. movie tie-in is the poster boy for the whole period – after Atari managed to make more cartridges than there were consoles and ended up burying most of them (so legend says) in a New Mexico landfill site.

But E.T. was just one terrible game amongst many and others, like the offensively poor Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man, effectively killed the appetite for video games amongst both gamers and the shops that were meant to sell them. With increasing competition from home computers (which were already dominant in Europe – where the crash was largely irrelevant) retailers simply refused to keep selling video games.

This lasted for two years, during which video games almost ceased to exist in the US. Things were only turned around in 1985 with the launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), although major stores only agreed to sell that once Nintendo convinced them it was really a toy, not a console (thanks to add-ons like R.O.B. the robot). It’s a sobering thought that the entire games industry has already destroyed itself once through its own greed and short-sightedness. But surely that could never happen again, could it….?

 

[Dr_Mayus]

How did Gizmondo not make that list

 

Also I would have added in Hot Coffee as well (the scandal that caused should have been enough)

[Death]

I thought the Pippin and Jaguar were bigger fails than the Sega CD and 32X. I mean at least the CD and 32X had games!

[Azaan60]

What about the Virtual Boy?

[Bullstomp]

What about the Virtual Boy?

 

 

Good call, Virtual Boy definitely deserves a spot. What a piece of crap that was!

[eynotie]

uDraw should be on there somewhere. Pretty much nailed the coffin shut on THQ's hopes for survival.

[lordfenton]

Very good list overall. There should be honorable mentions and I'll list em:


LJN doing licences games up the wazoo- Trust me it's like the 1983 video game crash with crap being produced more than good. Thus LJN no longer exists.

Atari giving Nintendo the middle finger- That's right Nintendo waited til crash happened since Atari turned them down to work on an upgraded console. Crash hits and Nintendo went to save the Industry thus I respect Nintendo in that department.

Spore DRM- First signs of DRM points to Spore.  Overrated game with DRM so bad that people pirated this game more than buy it and realize it will overrated.

Udraw- THQ final nail on I did so many things the LJN way.

3D0, Atari Jaugar and Neo Geo prices- Those three caused the companies behind em to hide in the shadows aka Neo Geo makers, go bankrupt aka 3DO a few years later or about to go bankrupt like about now Atari.

I can list more when I can think of em but that's it for now.

[Fierce_DeityX1]

Good list

[Tomato]

People were extremely unlucky or I was extremely lucky I still own the original 360 from 2006 and never had an issue with it yet, and I doubt I ever will since I haven't played anything on it for a few months now.

[Parker]

People were extremely unlucky or I was extremely lucky I still own the original 360 from 2006 and never had an issue with it yet, and I doubt I ever will since I haven't played anything on it for a few months now.

 

You're extremely lucky. Every single person I know who bought a 360 on launch got the RRoD within a year. I went to a good friends house the day of launch after he purchased his and we played a few hours of Halo 2 and his system got the RRoD. It took Microsoft months to get him a new one. 

 

 

Parker