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[Roberts]

I'm kind of satisfied with gaming, tbh. I just play what I like on a console that I like and have a backlog that will last me until 2034 if not longer, just in case if it all goes to shit and there are no more good games coming out.

 

[dorkimoe]

Patches? Nobody releases finished games anymore, they just expect us to play broken shit until its patched

Paying to beta test? They have somehow figured out people will pay $50 for an unfinished game to play it early and basically beta test for them

 

[Moriarty1889]

Add to that Xbox going all in on day one AAA exclusives on PC and Gamepass. Also them telling people they don’t need to play on an Xbox console thus killing their own console sales. All thanks to that moron Phil Spinster. He has run the brand into the ground and the results speak for themselves. Sad what he has reduced Xbox to and he is still at the helm which is pure madness imo.

 

[Rickyiez]

Woke culture

 

[Itchy Tickles]

The Internet / digital sales. It made devs so lazy and sloppy they release broken unfinished shit and just say "a patch will come" IF we are lucky. No dignity or dedication in releasing a finished product and still crying about costs while putting in less effort and at the same time releasing bullshit dlc.

Gaming companies exploiting every customer with gambling mechanics, paid dlc for stuff that was in games previously - from unlockable costumes, fighters, guns, game modes, even cheats. They also say "it's ONLY cosmetics" while these "doesn't effect gameplay" items make these cunts millions, hundreds of millions, and BILLIONS. And yes, gamers who buy this crap are to blame too, just not as much as these poor CEOs who are nearly homeless while having to "survive" with the millions they get on bonuses alone.

Achievements from Xbox. The amount of issues these have caused is scary. I remember before GTA4 they said cheats you use would not only prevent Achievements unlocking but also lock you out of SAVING your game. Games then all used that excuse so they could sell cheats instead. Microsoft was happy with that. Look at shit now, games like Resident Evil selling "time savers" or Mortal Kombat selling "easy fatalities" to name just 2, these are cheat codes that are being sold for real money.

Obviously so much more.

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

Whales. They feed the greed machine.

 

[fhco]

The gameplay has no purpose or goal. Presentation is not cohesive. Window dressing cannot hide that. Feel free to waste your money and time to get nowhere in roguelikes. It has pretty much turned the entire indie scene to shit. Soon enough it will turn many bigger titles to shit too.

I think the problem here is that we're talking about different games. I am referring to games like Nethack, ADOM, DCSS, ToME, Caves of Qud, et al.

 

[Shut0wen]

I don't think MS benefited. It offered competition for Xbox 360, which pressured them into going down the Kinect path. Wii's influence was literally the beginning of the end for Xbox.

Nah i meant more hardcore gamers went towards 360 due to the price of ps3 while everyones mum and nan had a wii

 

[Shut0wen]

Well, there is no question that the companies benefited. We gamers didn’t however, which is why I list it here.

How not? Theres tons of great wii games, best console for jrpgs and platformers for its time, had cool colour palette games while everything on ps3 and 360 just went with the cod filter

 

[simpatico]

XBone. All they needed was an Xbox 720 and they would own the high end console market. This one will never be beaten.

 

[kingpotato]

Gamers paying for Xbox Live which has become all systems effectively having a subscription service to use them.

uDraw for the Wii killed THQ.

WiiU was the wrong follow-up to the Wii, terrible branding on top of a lackluster product.

 

[cinnamonandgravy]

video games going mainstream

also nintendo still failing to find a miyamoto successor.

 

[NeoIkaruGAF]

Kojima and Nomura unbridled.

Chasing cinema at all costs, creating an unfillable gap between AAA and everything else, and equating quality with production values in the eyes of too many gamers.

Dropping almost everything related to motion controls after the 7th gen. It’s absolutely baffling how people would rather have rear paddles on controllers than gyro aiming and IR pointers.

 

[JohnnyFootball]

There's lots, but for the purposes of this thread I'll pick one that comes to mind:

• Releasing Halo Infinite a year before it was actually ready

I feel like Infinite's disappointing release started a cascade of events where Microsoft went from being viewed pretty favorably with some building excitement behind the brand again, to where they're at today (which is pretty much dead as a 1st party platform holder). If Infinite released a year later with a better campaign, more maps and modes, and Forge all ready to go, it would likely have been one of the most popular online shooters around.

It also forced Microsoft to put all of their eggs into the Starfield basket, and while I feel Starfield was a legitimately good/great game, it certainly didn't live up to the lofty sales or critical expectations set for it by Microsoft.

It's funny that you mention that Halo Infinite needed another year. Infinite actually needed to be a launch title for XSX and needed to be a great game. If that had happened, this gen may have been drastically different.

However, Xbox studios had been so poorly mismanaged even if Halo Infinite had been delayed another year, it wouldn't have changed much. You can't simply just throw money at things and fix them without talented people to get them in order. Xbox proved that having money is meaningless without the talent to manage it. Nadella and Stuart have seen the kind of revenue that ABK is bringing in and are not about to let Spencer ruin it by putting everything on Gamepass and taking it off Playstation where it's likely generating the bulk of it's revenue.

 

[laynelane]

The gradual decrease of passion and creativity and the increase in corporate interests/stock holder interests and excessive focus on making as much money as possible. Gaming has become a big industry so it was always going to gain the interest of various corporations and big financial groups. Consequently, we've seen a rapid increase in various things that add nothing but ways to make an easy buck off of players (which is where a lot of the things already mentioned come from). As well, products designed from the ground up to generate money over the long term have become more and more frequent.

I'm thankful we still have games that are made with passion and creativity (eg. Elden Ring, BG3, etc.), but there's so many franchises and games that have been muddied by unchecked greed and lack of care.

 

[Bond007]

Allowing:

Pay for Online with XBL Gold
Being ok with Microtransactions
Allowing digital only for convenience
Beating ok with Battlepasses/Season Passes
Actually thinking exclusives don't matter

Just to name a few atrocities.

 

[cartman414]

Nintendo not using Sony for the cd drive.

Xbox One reveal set the Xbox brand back immensely. Also mandatory Kinect.

Nintendo not going with Sony. Also the WiiU.

Sony’s PS3 hubris. I’d also say their lazy approach to first party since the PS3 days ended, but clearly this is a me issue and not an industry issue or “mistake”.

Saturn launch from Sega.

Bethesda and Microsoft and horse armor, and people accepting it
Console online pay walls and gamers accepting it
Xbox One reveal and DRM plan before it was scrapped (bad for Microsoft)
Microsoft leaving its flagship franchise to 343i after so many fuck ups
Sony moving its PlayStation HQ to California, with all that entails
Sony buying Bungie
Hirinobu Sakaguchi leaving Square for his own ventures
Nintendo going back on Sony, which lead to the birth of Sony PlayStation (bad for Nintendo)

Edit: Oh and how can I forget, Konami for letting Kojima go. Then going on hiatus with gambling machines. Leaving MGS's future up in the air and other franchises boxed away for years. Wth was up with that.

I agree and I don't. Nintendo could simply have included CD in the N64 made by anyone, but by the time they had flirted Sony into releasing their own game console by contracting them and pissing them off, maybe they should have just used Sony. Surely choosing them as manufacturer for your disc drive would be a cheaper way to eliminate Playstation than...oh wait, they never did.

The first several that came to mind:

Nintendo creating Sony due to their arrogance.

599 US dollars.

Microsoft giving up Xbox 360 levels of market control due to their always online and kinect insistence.

And Atari having no quality control, to the point of destroying the entire industry for a time.

People still not getting that Sony tried to screw Nintendo first. They would have become a competitor either way.

The Weird History Of The Super NES CD-ROM, Nintendo's Most Notorious Vaporware

Nintendo never released a CD-ROM gaming system. But for a while in the early 1990s, it flirted with the idea. That protracted will-they-won’t-they romance produced pages of breathless gossip columns in video game magazines, a mountain of vaporware, some terrible Zelda games, and one priceless...

kotaku.com

Sony trying to fuck Yamauchi with their modified Play Station contract that would’ve locked Nintendo out of the Super CD software.

This guy gets it.

Though Yamauchi didn't react in the best way. No matter, the Switch may soon top the PS2.

- Commodore spending time and money on the TED chip for the +4 & C16.

- Every controller Nintendo did after the SNES.
They tried too hard to innovate with gimmicks, while Sony found the perfect form with the Dualshock and just kept refining it.

- Wii era Motion controls. Everyone panicked and thought Nintendo was on to something and they quickly squeezed out imitations with Kinect & PS Move. But they were, all of them, deceived, for it was shite.

You are totally right.

It's the "designed around it" part that is the issue for me, because I hate it.

Just like I completely avoided games that were 100% Stylus on the Nintendo DS (Even though it was very cool, I absolutely hated having to use it).

I appreciate Nintendo's ability and confidence in taking risks and experimenting with out of the box ideas.

But my brain loves this, and hates anything that isn't this

I like "Boring but Practical" design, when it comes to controlling a game.

PS/DualShock controllers were too small until the DS4. And that d-pad is 2d kryptonite.

 

[ManaByte]

People still not getting that Sony tried to screw Nintendo first. They would have become a competitor either way.

The Weird History Of The Super NES CD-ROM, Nintendo's Most Notorious Vaporware

Nintendo never released a CD-ROM gaming system. But for a while in the early 1990s, it flirted with the idea. That protracted will-they-won’t-they romance produced pages of breathless gossip columns in video game magazines, a mountain of vaporware, some terrible Zelda games, and one priceless...

kotaku.com

This guy gets it.

Though Yamauchi didn't react in the best way. No matter, the Switch may soon top the PS2.

Sony is lucky Yamauchi didn't put a Yakuza hit out on them over that contract fuckery.

 

[MAX PAYMENT]

Ps3's Cell processor.
An entire generation of Playstation games can't be played on modern hardware without either buying it again as a remaster, or streaming it (which is garbage.)

 

[Salmonboy]

Fortnite, microtransactions and woke developers!

 

[Deerock71]

The xbox one almost killed the brand which hasn't recovered yet.

 

[Darkmakaimura]

DRM. I'm sorry but I'm including everybody's favorite Steam on here as well. But it seems people really don't like to support DRM free so we're always going to have it now unfortunately.

One of my top choices would be day one patches which are practically required nowadays.

Of course also appealing to "modern audiences" aka 'woke' garbage.

Micro transactions and DLC. I wouldn't have an issue with the latter if it were more like an expansion on a separate disc or something or DRM free digitally.

Canceling the sequel to the 2006 Prey game.

 

[Alebrije]

Videogames becoming a politic ecochamber. That is the worse of last decade. Agendas are more important that graphics, lore, gameplay.

 

[Hypereides]

I got a bunch, but I'll highlight the biggest one in my book:

Western, or most, AAA going from being lead by actual creative and imaginative minds to becoming spearheaded, hijacked and financed by silent suits, managers and investment bankers pulling strings from the background.

The "Bobby Kotick syndrome", if you will. All the big CEOs back in the 7th gen took notice of how Activision made CoD big and copied his playbook. The result is a continuous cycle of aggressive focus on monetization, much less on visionary and groundbreaking game ideas. Modern day western AAA have become the equivalent of uninspiring junkfood.

 

[newtypepilot]

sega's 32x and cd attachments
virtual boy
xbone and kinect
xbox players dumb enough to pay for online multiplayer, setting a terrible standard for everyone else.
stadia
western companies going on a price war and spamming shovelware games which led to the crash in the 80s.
atari

 

[butane bob]

What do you think are the biggest mistakes that have happened in gaming?

Publishers trying to turn video games into interactive tv shows - throwing interactivity under a bus in favour of """story""". This destroyed the entire point of the medium, stifled innovation/creativity, blew the dev budgets sky high and the end result is slop that's nowhere near as good as the film/tv mediums they're attempting to compete with.

Runner up - Microsoft. Everything they have spearheaded in this industry has been pure cancer.

 

[StereoVsn]

Biggest mistake (for us) was Apple “encouraging” (pushing) F2P or super cheap mobile games with MTX.

That led to the shit show that is current mobile gaming. Early on there were all kinds of cool titles for say $5-10 and even up to $15-20.

 

[hlm666]

People paying subscriptions for multiplayer access. Buy the game, Pay for your internet access, and then pay some muppets again to play it online when they don't even host the servers 95% of the time. Should have been a straight forward fail.

 

[NeverYouMind]

I see your pad, and raise you. The CD32 pad!

It was horrific. After a short while the D pad disc would snap which meant it would spin on it's own axis, you'd spend 10% of your time playing and 90% trying to re spin it back to position

Pure bunk

You are making me consider how good I had it with the ColecoVision paddle. It was built to last.

 

[Majormaxxx]

Neil D
Anita S
Blue hair writers

 

[Killjoy-NL]

 

[Moses85]

Gamepass

 

[MasterDerico]

Day 1 patch, unfinished games on release, political agenda in games, microtransactions, dlc abuse, online only games.