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GAF Votes FOTY 2012 Thread: Fail Of The Year

M

massoluk

Banned
It's Curt Schilling and 38 Studio.

Preach all those "Government handout is bad", took said money from the government, then burned to the ground along with another veteran studio Big Huge Game with it. In the same time, screwing the employees big time with lies and lies.
 
M

mattiewheels

And then the LORD David Bowie saith to his Son, Jonny Depp: 'Go, and spread my image amongst the cosmos. For every living thing is in anguish and only the LIGHT shall give them reprieve.'
Man, there was a lot of fail to choose from this year. Maybe gamers are more easily riled up...

- ME3 (clear winner)
- Diablo 3 bitching
- 38 Studios
- Silicon Knights
- Journalist apocalyse
- Vita (jk, love mine)
 
G

guek

Banned
Skyzard said:
I'm going to prepare an I told you so youtube account and plan a party for the turnaround :p
Click to expand...

If Vita has a resurgence and indeed becomes the planet's "most desirable handheld", I think every gaf member should pitch in ten bucks and have "SKYZARD WAS RIGHT engraved on a mountainside.

On another note, I don't how you could possibly say Wii U is doing worse unless you're talking about JP and UK launch week and launch week only. Wii U is flopping like a fish out of water already in Europe but the smell of vita's rotting carcass can be smelled worldwide.
 
B

BolognaSoup

Member
The embarrassing fan reaction to the
Mass Effect 3 ending.


That guy that made those weird controller things that treated the customer like crap...was that this year? The story blew up on Twitter and else where. He said he was big at PAX and so on. Can't remember his name.
 
G

grimshawish

Banned
This year is fucking filled! Wow!

Vita
Greenlight
E3
Games Journalism
Mass Effect 3
Resident Evil 6
War Z being advertised by Steam

More there. Somewhere.

I'll go for my FOTY: War Z on Steam.
Its basically confirmed feelings I've had since Greenlight. Valve are not willing to really support Steam and their Customers as fully as they should be. With a lot of things going on I've started to drift from Steam. Its a good time for Origins and other services to come around.

Basically a case of leaving their customers open to getting conned. Thats all it is.
Whilst the customer service side of Steam has been shown as even more non-existent than previously believed.
I chose this as my FOTY more as a way of saying it needs to change; I want the good parts of the service to be met with a better run organisation and customer side to the service.
 
T

Tallshortman

Member
massoluk said:
It's Curt Schilling and 38 Studio.

Preach all those "Government handout is bad", took said money from the government, then burned to the ground along with another veteran studio Big Huge Game with it. In the same time, screwing the employees big time with lies and lies.
Click to expand...

Yeah I don't understand how Mass Effect 3's alright but not great ending is somehow within even shooting distance of dozens/hundreds of people having their entire lives fundamentally affected in a very serious way as well as NJ tax payers getting shafted.
 
N

Neuromancer

Member
More quotes about 38 Studios

Deadlines were frequently missed, something for which staffers say Schilling rarely held anyone accountable. The ex-pitcher had a bigger concern. “The game wasn’t fun,” he says, unprompted, beside the softball field. “It was my biggest gripe for probably the past eight to 12 months.” Visually, Copernicus was stunning, but the actual things you could do in the game weren’t engaging enough. The combat aspects especially lagged. Schilling — who never wavered in his belief that the game would be great — says the MMO was improving, but after six years, it still wasn’t there. When Schilling walked around during lunch hour, he says, nobody was playing Copernicus’s internal demos. They were all on some other game.
Click to expand...
On May 24, the entire 38 Studios staff was laid off via e-mail. They hadn’t been paid since the end of the previous month, but their problems were just beginning. In short order, their healthcare disappeared and their 401(k)s were frozen. Then, MoveTrek Mobility — a company 38 Studios hired during the relocation to Providence to buy and resell employees’ Massachusetts homes — notified seven people that, because it had not yet sold their houses, they were potentially responsible for their old mortgages. And Atlas Van Lines alerted some individuals that they were on the hook for bills that management hadn’t paid.
Click to expand...
[Shilling] concedes that he’d promised his employees 60 days’ warning if the money ever looked like it was going to run out, but argues that the situation was moving too fast for him to keep sending updates. “It wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell anyone,” he says, “it’s I didn’t know what to say.”
Click to expand...
End Game: Inside the Destruction of Curt Schilling's 38 Studios
 
I

Impeccable

Member
Tallshortman said:
Yeah I don't understand how Mass Effect 3's alright but not great ending is somehow within even shooting distance of dozens/hundreds of people having their entire lives fundamentally affected in a very serious way as well as NJ tax payers getting shafted.
Click to expand...

Short sightedness and not being able to grasp the scale of what happened, I think.

It's clearly 38 Studios.
 
C

Codeblue

Member
It's got to be 38 Studios, right?

Millions of tax payer dollars and hundreds of jobs evaporated.

Doritogate was awful, but it was really just shining a light on things everyone knew to be true.

I'll save my Vita nomination for the year it goes under if Sony can't turn it around.
 
S

Sinistral

Member
Bioware? They went from AAA developer to... questionable.

ME3 ending.
SW:TOR performance. I know this came out in 2011, but that was December 13, 2011. Massive budget, overpromise, under deliver, F2P all within a year of release.
 
M

Mobius1B7R

Member
Fail of the year easily has to be WarZ. They basically have committed fraud.

The Vita is a great system and I think will bounce back eventually. Once a price drop hits I think it will do well.

Not AS big of a fail as WarZ but still kind of big to me is the Wii U. All the people I have talked to think it's an add on for the Wii itself and "too expensive." They really should have named it Wii 2 or something completely different. Most of the games don't run all that well and we all know how great 3rd party support is on Nintendo systems.
 
S

ShutEye

Member
Mass Effect 3 ending is the most disappointed I've ever been with a video game.

Valve's gold standard of customer service seeming to slip is scarier.

2012 has been kind of crappy.

voting for Mass Effect 3 due to emotional pain.
 
Z

zroid

Banned
War Z was pretty bad, but is it high enough profile to be FOTY?

I think it has to be Doritosgate.


Also, wow at people voting for Wii U. That is patently absurd. It was rough in parts, but doesn't even approach the failed launches of 3DS and Vita.
 
BibiMaghoo

BibiMaghoo

Member
My vote goes to the mass effect 3 ending debacle.

That includes writers getting hate mail, EA being voted the worst company in America, and a company as respected in the industry as bioware was, having to remake a games ending to appease people.

It was fucking pathetic in the extreme.

Honorable mentions go too:

COD:BOD and Nihilistics shame.
That shill curt and 38.
 
M

Man-is-Obsolete

Member
I'd say Gaming journalism all together has hit an all time low as far as reputation and the value of their opinions. I mean we have stories coming out about how many journalists are courted by publishers and many sites have been exposed for flat out using PR as news. On top of that you have the sudden switch in sites adjusting their review scale all of sudden and suddenly discovering scores exist beneath a 7. Also as a handheld owner I hate how handheld games are always criticized for not literally being the console version of a particular franchise entry all the way down to graphics. Never mind the fact handheld games are cheaper but they can be played on a handheld....anywhere. Meanwhile buggy and completely broken console games get high scores when they pale in comparison to PC versions.

It is culmination of all these things that just make journalists even less important and trustworthy than they were before. Forget the fact that news is actually broken and fact checked on NeoGaf a lot better than it is on major sites, so even delivering news fast and reliably is broken.
 
J

Josh7289

Member
Tallshortman said:
Yeah I don't understand how Mass Effect 3's alright but not great ending is somehow within even shooting distance of dozens/hundreds of people having their entire lives fundamentally affected in a very serious way as well as NJ tax payers getting shafted.
Click to expand...

Rhode Island.
 
H

HamPster PamPster

Member
I remembered another Honorable Mention:

No Nick Suttner and Phil Kollar podcast all year. Both are in the same city for the first time in years. Nick is on a podcast. Phil writes for a website with a podcast. WHY DIDN'T THEY PODCAST TOGETHER? WTF. At least once would have been nice, for old times sake

1up FM :(
 
H

Hot Coldman

Banned
Not sure if "shitty ending" is good enough, guys. It's a failure, but it's not, say, the loss of jobs, taxpayer money and a promising game.

BruceLeeRoy said:
Its got to be Dennis D. It just has to be.
Click to expand...

Fail of the Last Ten Years, more like. The erosion of Silicon Knights has been a long, slow process with most of Dyack's key decisions being made years ago (making Too Human, suing Epic, etc).
 
T

Thraktor

Member
Second said:
And the WiiU hasn't done that either in most European countries...
Should we call it dead too?
Click to expand...

Japan is a far bigger games market than any European country. Besides, we have very little data on the short period that the Wii U's been on store shelves, and what data we do have indicates that it's doing, to borrow the phrase, "solid, if not spectacular". Conversely, we have lots of data on Vita, it's been out for the best part of a year (moreso in Japan), and it's been averaging sub-15k weeks in all three main regions for most of the year. It would have to do astonishingly well in December in NA and EU, and continue that momentum into the new year, for it to stand a chance in the long run. As far as Japan is concerned, it's currently enjoying worse second-Christmas sales than the XBox360.

I never like to see hardware fail, and I'd very much like for some great software to come along which gives me a reason to buy a Vita, but at this stage I seriously wonder what publisher is actually going to fund games for the platform.
 
W

Wolfgunblood Garopa

Member
Studios close, investors make bad decisions, it happens, more often than usual lately and it sucks, but it doesn't make 38 Studios such a huge story other than a few scandalous details.

SK had to destroy all of the code for it's games and had an actual track record of making games people cared about.

I still think the shitshow at E3 this year was it. Shotgun blast to the face, everything was Uncharted... it was fucking dire.
 
R

Road

Member
Vita.

We haven't had this sort of failure from one of the major players in at least a decade.

Development studio with bad management? It must be Thursday.
 
L

LosDaddie

Banned
Nert said:
When people are using the term "Doritos-gate," they're talking about a lot more than that funny photo with Geoff shilling snack chips. People lost jobs over this and it developed into a massive, industry-wide embarrassment.

Again, for anyone who hasn't looked at it yet, at least skim this post.
Click to expand...

Meh. I've read most of those links before. I just don't see the shady dealings of the gaming press as anything surprising, or new.
 
B

bobs...onGaf

Member
monsterfracas said:
Pre-release:

-Some of the worst PR seen in a long time. Huge aspects of the game are never explained by 343 Industries. The majority of news comes from shaky cam footage and uncomfirmed reports from people that played it

-Limited Edition announced, included items are a season pass and early access to "specializations" (Halo 4's equivalent of perks)

At Launch
-Several legacy features of Halo 4 cut without any mention from 343 (campaign theater, campaign scoring, the Assault gametype, and a lot more). People learned of this through players that acquired the game early
-Matchmaking issues across the board.
-Online Fileshares (again, a huge feature of Halo games) aren't working. 343 acknowledges it, says "we're working on it".
-Several in game glitches in matchmaking (reloading glitches, being able to clip into maps)
-The Specializations included in the Limited Edition are made free to anyone (via an Xbox Live redeemable code) who played the game online before November 20th, lowering the value of the Limited Edition (which ended up not being limited at all)

First DLC Pack
-Prior to December 10th: Specialization codes sent out. At first, you couldn't receive the code unless you had opted in to receive Xbox Live marketing emails. After that was resolved, not everyone got their code. Then 343 sent out codes to players via Xbox Live message. This continues below:
-December 10th: Crimson Map Pack released. Anyone who had already purchased the Limited Edition or the map pack separately was unable to get their maps for 10 hours after launch, while anyone who purchased them individually got them immediately
-When ^the above issue was resolved, the map pack was accidentally made free for everyone who had received a specialization code, whether you had redeemed the season pass or not.
-Conflicting explanations are given by various members of 343 and the Xbox Live support team as to why this happened. The general consensus is that all who got the map pack for free could keep it
-Microsoft and 343 literally make up a fake program called the "14 Day, Buy and Play Program". In this program, which was never mentioned prior to their press release, anyone who played the game online before November 20th received access to all specializations, and also got the first map pack free for 2 weeks.
-Prior to the end of the 14 Day, Buy and Play Program, several players that had gotten the map pack for free begin reporting that their Xbox Live account had been banned from Halo 4 matchmaking. However, this issue was resolved
Click to expand...

Would like to add the terrible way players are treated based on region. People in America get free map pack trials/ extra perks/ double exp - people outside of America get nada.

Halo 4 is hands down my nominee for fail of the year. Its a good game, but it should have been a fantastic game.
 
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