#1. Doritosgate
It's for two reasons: the circle the wagons mentality that too many media types swung into when the shit hit the fan as if those doing so were immune to criticism, and the continued erosion of both the trust of the core audience and the relevancy to the generalist audience.
#2. 38 Studios
The sheer amount of money lost and on such a boondoggle of a subgenre (WoW Wanna-be) is staggeringly tragic and stupid.
#3. Anti-Japanese Gaming Mouth Diarrhea As Cheap Heat
Stating the obvious is boring, it's best when done so in the most personal, pig-ignorant way. It doesn't matter if
it's during a PR interview about your own game involving seriously-told time-traveling assassin conciences and Ancient Aliens All-Stories or
to the face of a man whose career is orders of magnitude longer than yours and who is launching a business in a growing venue in the precense of your peers, attacking Japan's offering with invectives and hyperbole is the new way to add a little spice to your PR campaign that your livelihood depends on.
#4. Mass Effect 3's Ending's Fallout
Rule #1 of devs: Listen to your fans. Do not obey, or even give off that you're supposed to obey them. What do we have here? Them doing just that, to the apparent aftermath. It isn't even about how busted the ending was (despite the planned nature of the trilogy, it felt as if it was written on a cocktail napkin late in February), or even the naked theft of what passed for agency in this series, it was the swerving deperation to appease fans and all the backlash and hightened selective expectations that go along with it.
#5. IndexHoldings/Atlus_JP Region Locking on the PS3
Lost them sales from Europe, the importation from NA to Japan was minute at best, and they go down in history as having had put out a RLed game on one of the last few consoles to avoid doing this. Special note to people tut-tutting boycotters, as if the vast throngs of gamers who don't buy Atlus games out of apathy are beyond similar criticism or that Atlus is beholden to their sales for this one title just because the boycotters are the Faithful.