The biggest gaming disappointments of 2016

While nothing gets us excited like a new game announcement, it’s hard not to be a little disappointed with the gaming industry at times.

While it’s easy to point at games like Homefront: The Revolution or Mirrors Edge Catalyst as disappointing titles, they never looked like they were going to blow our socks off to begin with.

Below (in no particular order) are 2016’s biggest gaming disappointments, the topics that cut deeper than the others:

No Man’s Sky and the Hype Train

While we made a point of not calling out specific titles as disappointing, it’s hard not to bring up No Man’s Sky and its marketing.

While No Man’s Sky is an incredibly flawed game, the biggest problem lies with the game’s marketing or rather the expectations created by the marketing.

It happens every year that a game is hyped up only to disappoint, but never to these massive levels.

We’re not sure if we’re more disappointed in the gaming public for continuously falling for it or Hello Games for their refusal to provide actual information surrounding the game.

Regardless, it’s disappointing all round.

Pokemon GO

Pokemon GO’s massive nostalgia hit and incredible simplicity was responsible for the game’s meteoric rise over the month of June.

Never have we seen a game enter the mainstream quite like Pokemon GO, and for two weeks that was all anyone was talking about.

The fact that the game was as deep as a puddle and incredibly broken at launch was responsible for an even more brutal descent as the game went from a good time to a running joke overnight.

South African Pricing

This is the big one.

Blame it on the rand, the government, or just the rising cost of living it has never been a more expensive time to be a gamer in South Africa.

While one could argue that pricing increases every year, it has never been quite so obvious as in 2016.

As both PC and console games creep past the R1,000 point, PC hardware becomes less affordable and pre-owned prices soar, our wallets have never hurt so much as in 2016.

We’re not quite sure what happened to the R600 AAA titles of the previous generation.