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What is the biggest manufacturing blunder in video game history?

S

Sulik2

Member
Looking at the insanity around how under produced the SNES Classic seems to be has me thinking. What is the biggest manufacturing blunder in gaming history? Is it the amount of Atari ET carts produced? Red ring of death? Nintendo Wii/Amiibos/NES Classic/SNES Classic under production? Actually making the Steel Battalion controller? $600 PS3? I'm sure there were more in the 80/90s I'm not remembering.

IMHO its the red ring of death. It killed Microsoft's momentum right as they were taking dominance of the home console industry. It cost them billions and the Xbox division still has never turned a profit. A little more testing of their manufacturing processes and they would have found the problems with lead free solder and their GPUs.

Nintendo's handling of the classic systems is the worst in the last 5 years for sure though.
 
T

The Technomancer

card-carrying scientician
Red Ring of Death is notable to me just because of how much that must have fucking cost Microsoft. I can't imaging a company without Microsoft's cash coming back from that
 
D

Dynomutt

Member
PS4 Slim/Pro no UHD. Not a deal breaker but definitely an oversight imo.

Edit: As many have said RROD. I know folks who made a living off of reballing techniques and listing repairs on Craiggers. People paying for a permanent Q-tip fix was and is still hilarious.
 
Z

Zombie James

Banned
RROD, easily. The original 360 design was idiotic. Seriously, who decided that putting the optical drive directly on top of the GPU heatsink with zero airflow was a good idea?
 
J

jelly

Member
Original Xbox cost a fortune because they couldn't cost reduce the hardware, think Nvidia had them over a barrel, maybe Intel too. They made a constant loss, big reason why they killed it off. Basically what they paid day one was what they paid all the time for parts, ouch. Anyone want an 8GB hard drive...

Subsequently, rushing the 360, what a disaster that was, shows you how good the 360 was to survive that.
 
L

luulubuu

Junior Member
CQ-DgYtVAAA7Eem.jpg:orig
 
F

finley83

Banned
I remember being shocked by the scale of the RROD back in the first few years, it seemed truly unprecedented.

Then I heard about YLOD on the fat PS3s and basically swore off ever buying a machine at launch for the rest of my life.

I guess at least the original Wii's are pretty reliable.
 
L

LegitMcfalls

Member
ET almost killed video games for good. Red ring cost Microsoft alot of money but they managed to recover. I wouldn't blame manufacturering though. ET was a hasty business decision to get a game out that failed and red ring was a poor design by the xbox engineers. The left joycon fiasco was probably more of a manufacturing mistake.
 
L

L Thammy

Member
finley83 said:
I remember being shocked by the scale of the RROD back in the first few years, it seemed truly unprecedented.

Then I heard about YLOD on the fat PS3s and basically swore off ever buying a machine at launch for the rest of my life.

I guess at least the original Wii's are pretty reliable.
Click to expand...

Never had the issue myself, but some of the launch Wiis had a disk drive issue. I think they scraped the disc, something like that?
 
P

Pharaun

Member
LegitMcfalls said:
ET almost killed video games for good. Red ring cost Microsoft alot of money but they managed to recover. I wouldn't blame manufacturering though. ET was a hasty business decision to get a game out that failed and red ring was a poor design by the xbox engineers. The left joycon fiasco was probably more of a manufacturing mistake.
Click to expand...

E.T. was crazy because they made something like twice as many game cartridges as there were Atari consoles. I know that they were expecting it to be a big seller/system mover, but that amount of over production is literally insane.
 
F

Freddo

Member
finley83 said:
I remember being shocked by the scale of the RROD back in the first few years, it seemed truly unprecedented.

Then I heard about YLOD on the fat PS3s and basically swore off ever buying a machine at launch for the rest of my life.

I guess at least the original Wii's are pretty reliable.
Click to expand...

Yeah. I had a launch PS3 and the fan was so damn loud almost like a vacuum cleaner cause it had to work so much, and eventually it went YLOD. Since then I've decided that I will only buy more energy efficient <100W consoles. All that generated heat in a tight space with poor airflow, yeah, not gonna take any more chances. Plus, I want it to be quiet.

Didn't buy a PS4 until the Slim model was released about a year ago, and I'm so pleased with it, it's whisper quiet and when I'm on the couch I can't hear it unless a disc is spinning.
 
H

Havok1313

Member
Wasn't Sony losing a ton on each PS3 sold even at $600? Or am I remembering wrong? I'd say either that or the RRoD.

Nintendo's bullshit isn't causing them regular losses at least, just loss of potential profit.
 
A

Alienous

Member
Ctrl + F: "Wii U"

0 results found.

I would've bet the farm on that.

Anyway I'd say PSVR. Sony couldn't keep up with the enthusiam, and I'm sure lost a ton of money in the process.

Edit:

Nevermind, it's UDraw.
 
F

Fisty

Member
vsaintlo said:
PS4 Slim/Pro no UHD. Not a deal breaker but definitely an oversight imo.

Edit: As many have said RROD. I know folks who made a living off of reballing techniques and listing repairs on Craiggers. People paying for a permanent Q-tip fix was and is still hilarious.
Click to expand...

Alienous said:
Ctrl + F: "Wii U"

0 results found.

I would've bet the farm on that.

Anyway I'd say PSVR. Sony couldn't keep up with the enthusiam, and I'm sure lost a ton of money in the process.
Click to expand...

Is today National Hot Take Day? Biggest manufacturing blunders in video game history and these are your contributions?
 
M

Mike Double U

Banned
I'm going to have to say Atari because it crashed the industry and 700,000 games were buried in the desert. Second place is definitely the Red Ring of Death. It was bad, but didn't result in that many consoles being buried somewhere (that we know of) Would third be the Virtual Boy? The Virtual Boy damaged my eyes more than the eclipse yesterday...
/s
But it really wasn't a manufacturing blunder because they designed with the redness in mind. So I'm not sure if that counts.

Biggest blunder on the software side was ET and more recently The Master Chief Collection.
 
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