10 Game Company Decisions That BACKFIRED BADLY

companies are not gamers and as such they sometimes make decisions that don't make any sense if you're a gamer hi folks it's falcon and today on game ranks 10 game company decisions that backfired bad number 10 pt the silent hills playable teaser you know exactly where i'm going with this by the way so pt was awesome it was just a phenomenal example of a short interesting game on its own and it was a tease for something much bigger that probably would have been amazing and i still mourn the loss konami attempting to erase it from history was probably one of the worst things they've ever done it backfired from both a pr perspective as well as basically from a market perspective from pr perspective obviously it made a bunch of people very angry i don't even need to go into much detail on that i'm still angry from a market perspective it created a demand for a game they were never going to release and effectively squash demand for anything that they did plan on releasing leaving kind of a black cloud over it so when you consider that metal gear survive kind of sucks it also the detriment of not being silent hills the thing konami owned which had a clear market demand it was just a dick move all around and in no way did it work out for them number 9 crisis 2 for a little bit of backstory crysis 1 was basically a no holds barred pc explosion it had a reputation of pushing graphics cards to their limit and for a long time was still looked at as a benchmark it was very open-ended you had a lot of choice and it was regarded as a game where the possibilities were endless now were they endless not necessarily but by the standards of that time it was a wild game crysis 2 not so much crysis 2 is paired back as to work on game consoles as well as pc and when your brand is video card melter and you basically make a super linear console game and release it on pc as well and you only support directx 9 which was at that point in outdated technology it's a big reversal of the kind of underlying ethos that influenced the game and even the ceo of crytek said yeah that backfired number eight the watchdogs downgrade yeah you remember the gameplay demo of watchdogs which was like gorgeous the demo was shown at e3 2012 and even by today's standards it's still like a really pretty demo at least in my opinion and when the game came out it really barely looked anything like that stylistically maybe it looked similar but the lighting and the effects were really nothing like that demo and part of that could be attributed to the fact that ubisoft montreal did not want to show the game in 2012. it was at the stage where they were still kind of pushing boundaries and knew that they were going to have to pair things back but at least ubisoft said they learned their lesson their ceo yves gilmout i'm sure i'm mispronouncing that and i apologize said with e3 2015 we said okay let's make sure the games are playable that they're running on the target machines instead of just kind of wild tech demos and ideas that hopefully someone is able to reach at some point on the target machines like the watchdogs 2012 demo now ubisoft shows games at a level they think will be playable and therefore not a big jump and therefore not a big pair back i mean that was a really big explosion they dealt with too people were mad about that first watch dogs game i was pretty mad personally if i remember right number seven claiming there would be interaction with other players in no man's sky i mean obviously a lot has changed since the release of no man's sky and there's actually multiplayer options now but i remember sean murray on talk shows saying to the question will you be able to interact with other people yes although it's extremely unlikely you'll ever see another person which just sounds like the ultimate bad deflection i'll if i'm totally honest that is such a bs response it's still annoying to this day even though they've kind of i think made up for it in every way going back to think about it it's like wow how did you not expect people to really get pissed off about this game i am happy that they learned from it and they spent the time making no man's sky into what it is today which is a way better game that addressed some of the things people were angry about but like let's be clear it was pretty obvious that they had not worked a multiplayer mechanic into the game when he was saying stuff like this it just wasn't true number six xbox one having always on drm essentially destroying the idea of used games now i'm not going to say that this decision reflects the state of gaming today frankly the physical game market is not what it was when this happened but i still feel a bit of the like ah you were trying to do this to us weren't you with the xbox one microsoft announced that you would always have to have it connected to the internet it would have a drm check and if you didn't own a game you couldn't play it on your system meaning if somebody else activated a copy of a game on another system and you put it into your system even though it was a physical copy of the game you weren't gonna play it meaning used games were pretty much done yeah people absolutely went ape [ __ ] over this one and rightfully so i mean at this point in time we were still looking at games as a physical object you purchased from the store and owned but over time that relationship is changed making it so we don't really own gams we own licenses to play games which is weird honestly this backfired as a pr nightmare for microsoft and this wasn't implemented on xbox but as we move to a digital download economy it's getting closer to this so maybe make some noise in the way we did back for the xbox one one because that was a spectacular backfiring that changed the course of things at least temporarily do we have another of that in us folks number five the arkham knight pc port outsourcing now there's one fact one simple thing that you can say that makes everything make sense regarding the pc version of batman arkham knight which was terrible it was a bug-riddled mess that frankly had no business being released to the public it was ported by a team of 12 people who normally handles mobile and console ports of pc games so the other way around they were also in charge of the arkham origins port but arkham origins was a very broken game at release on any platform so any issues really weren't their fault on that but basically very few resources were devoted to the pc port of arkham knight and i don't really blame this developer they most likely fought hard for the contract for the game by underbidding and saying they could do it with x amount of money and a big game publisher will always take whatever they think they'll make the most money with that's kind of the reality of it and only being able to devote 12 people is in a way really kind of the fault of the publisher for not wanting to appropriate resources towards pc development there's various interviews with anonymous quality testing people saying that they're also in the quality testing phase which had nothing to do with the developer it was an internal warner brothers thing almost no people or resources were dedicated to the pc version they just basically thought it was good enough no matter how because there wasn't going to be as many people playing it on pc anyway which turned out not to be true and it was a huge debacle it blew up in their face and rocksteady actually ended up having to do all of the fix work this is basically what happens when you outsource the pc port of a game to a company that doesn't have familiarity with the code and you don't give them much resources to put labor towards it number four three words steam paid mods like that's basically everything you need to know about this one they decided to make it so that mods would be a paid thing traditionally mods are a community thing they have nothing to do with markets or profit or anything like that and while i do like the idea of a modder getting paid for their labor i don't like the idea of it basically being an enforced thing by the overarching platform steam in this case where mods are a thing you pay for that changes the dynamic from hobbies and enjoyment to labor and licensing mods are just part of the joy of gaming and part of the community and this is not really a commodity this more or less made modding into a thing you could do as a market action you would create mods specifically to exchange them for money which influences what kind of mods get made whether people like it or not i don't like that personally and i wasn't alone yeah this is one of the things that i can remember the most violently angry response to of any random like non-content-oriented thing like you get pulling pt down people understand why that makes people angry but if you said yeah they made mods a thing where you pay i think a lot of people would have no idea what you meant but what it ultimately did was change an artistic endeavor a hobby a fun thing that people do for the fun of it into something you had to pay for and also something you expected money for and i just think that it totally changed the dynamic and i think everybody knew it was going to do that so fortunately that went away although bethesda come on guys number three speaking of mods remember when they banned mods from grand theft auto yeah rockstar issued a cease and desist order to a modding tool called open iv which was by the way basically a lot of single-player mods used that it was a big controversy to the point where 77 000 people signed an online petition and grand theft auto 5 got review bombed negatively with people just saying like come on basically like people buy this game from you you make tons of money and we just want to do the things that we want to do with it that we've done with every grand theft auto and uh so they went back on that they put out a statement that i'm not gonna bother reading because it acts as if they didn't really do anything wrong and that's not true but at least they understood that you need to go back on that for people to be happy with the game that they're supposed to do anything with including mod because let's be frank like grand theft auto mods have been a big reason why the whole series has been well received and that should frankly always be in the single player experience of pc grand theft auto number two diablo immortal i don't even know if i need to say anything else that's the amount of things i need to say for you to get this point but for the sake of a full understanding diablo immortal is basically the big diablo announcement of blizzcon in november 2018 and it was basically an announcement of a diablo game that was stripped back a lot for mobile release a lot of people were kind of anticipating a diablo announcement where they would actually get a new diablo game that they wanted to play but no it was basically just hey so we made like a cheap diablo for mobile yay yeah everyone's excited right why do you hate us so much it's because it's been a while since a mainline diablo game that's why if you had like announced this and a mainline diablo game i don't think everybody would have been quite as mad and who knows it might even be alright i don't discount the idea that it could be an interesting version of the game but all the silence really hasn't helped their case let's just say and finally number one star wars battlefront 2s loot boxes and microtransactions now you know what really works well as a business strategy making it so that to get to the parts of the game you want to get to like playing as darth vader or any number of other things takes 40 hours of gameplay and not fun gameplay more really laborious grinding gameplay and you're basically getting currency to open loot boxes on the off chance you could get darth vader which again took on average 40 hours did i mention it took 40 hours well it took 40 hours unless you pay money for virtual currency to open more loot boxes so essentially a there's gambling in it it's a slot machine you might get your darth vader and on top of that they basically turn grinding into a job that you're paid in the ability to not pay them money with i got some sheriff of nottingham stuff there back in my day games used to be about having an enjoyable experience now their actual literal work where the currency you're giving is basically a symbolic currency saying you don't have to pay them real currency it's just oh that dynamic is so messed up and it's not going away it's just battlefront was probably the most egregious example of it we've seen it's again a way better game now but the damage was really done back then was it not i i think so like i don't really play a battlefront it's kind of a tainted experience for me despite the fact that the gameplay itself is actually pretty good so don't do that ea and as a quick bonus point for you never forget all the promises made for the original fable and these were weird things like real-time tree growth to more practical things like prison being a more ongoing mechanic in the game i mean there is such a long list i couldn't detail it here but there were a lot of promises made that weren't in the game and peter molyneux i think probably really regrets a lot of that but let's be fair to him and say he did actually accomplish some pretty awesome stuff with his games still backfired that's basically his reputation is over promising sucks cause those games are good what are some big game company backfires you remember leave us a comment let us know what you think and if you like this video please click like if you're not subscribed now's a great time to do so we upload brand new videos every day of the week and the best way to see them first is of course the subscription so click subscribe and don't forget to click the notification bell as always we thank you very much for watching this video i'm falcon you can follow me on twitter at falcon the hero and we'll see you next time right here on game ranks

Channel: gameranx

Views: 3,303,993

Rating: 4.8852978 out of 5

Keywords: game companies, bad gaming decisions, bad game maker decisions, konami, pt, crysis 2, paid mods, microtransactions, gta 5 modding, gta 4 modding, gta mods disabled, rockstar games, ea, electronic arts, gameranx, falcon

Id: ClbQwjMtQSU

Length: 14min 15sec (855 seconds)

Published: Sun May 12 2019