6 video game disasters we wish we could forget

Xbox 360 Red Ring of Death

Every industry has a disaster factor to it. The entertainment industry has the Kardashians, the car industry has Ford, and the video game industry has its own fair share of terrible disasters that unfortunately there is no way of getting away from.

Sony’s PS3 reveal that shocked the world with its outrageous price tag, that time when Phil Spencer told you to buy an Xbox 360 instead of their new console, and let us not forget all those awkward moments n history where we let video game developer get the best of us.

Here are some of the most disastrous video game moments in history.


PS3 Pricing

The year is 2006, the PS2 has been out for a couple of years, and Sony is ready to unveil its brand new console and successor.

While a new console reveal is always fun to witness, Sony did an unspeakable thing and announced the console and its pricing at the same time. The issue here is that its pricing was something our of this world with the 80GB model releasing for a whopping $599.

Now I might know very little about inflation, but even in 2017, a console is almost half the price of the PS3’s original release price. To add to the mess, Sony’s overall presentation was filled with gimmicks and reveals that made the PS3 look like something of an April Fool’s joke. It took an entire year before Sony dropped the price by $100, and then a few years later by another.

However the PS4’s success has been, it took a while for Sony to recover from that expensive launch, and development for the console was a nightmare according to some game studios. At least Sony has made up for it like never before.


Haze is a complete mess

With the PS3 and Xbox 360 generation in full swing, the console owner’s dream for an immersive FPS was everyone’s wish. Better horsepower in consoles meant that developers could do bigger and better things. Haze was meant to be this, but it crashed and burnt terribly.

Announced as a PS3 title at first with plans to port it to Xbox 360, Ubisoft was determined to release a stunning FPS action game made for consoles. The trailers look epic, and we could not wait to play the game. Unfortunately in the end what we got was a shoddy experience with bland visuals, a terrible story, and voice acting that belonged in a parody YouTube video.

Haze was immediately canned for the Xbox 360, and Ubisoft never spoke of it again.


PSN Hack

Ah, the great PSN hack of 2011. Sony’s PSN is boasted as one of the most stable services in the world, and now we get to even pay for it as part of PlayStation Plus which was introduced the year before. What a time to be alive. Except that everything we thought the PSN was, was actually the complete opposite. Over 77 million user account details were breached, and we had no online service for more than three weeks.

Back then an outage of that length was still somewhat bearable as the online landscape was no as big as it was today, but still, three week of no PSN was a disaster. It turned out that hacker group Anonymous were behind the attack that brought the PSN to its knees. The hack lasted three weeks, and it took Sony years before they finally could put it behind them after dealing with court cases and handing out incentives to every player affected by the hack.

Credit card details were obtained, and everyone’s passwords too. While the hack was a disaster, it at least gave the world a wake-up call to show just how unsafe the net actually is.


Batman: Arkham Knight’s PC fail

PC players have always had it rough when it comes to ports of console titles. Unfortunately, we live in a day where developers focus more on console games as that is where the money is. No piracy and masses get treated to the game. Batman: Arkham Knight proof of this scenario as the game released on PS4 and Xbox One without a hitch.

The problem here is that the PC version of the game was outsourced to another studio, which if you ask me, had no idea what they were doing. What PC gamers got in the end, keep in mind that it was delayed, was a disaster of a game that had bugs, various visual issues, and crashes galore.

After trying to fix the game with patches and updates, Warner Bros. failed. It was not long before the studio completely pulled the game offline and took it out of stores and off online marketplaces. While the game is now available again online, it still suffered some rather harsh criticism due to the poor PC release and greatly affected sales of the game.


Final Fantasy XIV

MMOs are everywhere these days and in order for you to stand out, you need to be awesome. How better can you be than a Final Fantasy MMO? Well, that was not the case when Final Fantasy XIV first released. The announcement of the game was already something we cannot forget.

Back at Sony’s 2009 E3 press conference, the game was announced with a cool trailer. While we were all excited for it, we did not know it was an online game until the end of the trailer when the words “online” appeared.

When the game finally hit retail in 2010 it was welcomed with some rather nasty criticism. Critics thought the game was unfinished with a buggy experience, poor UI, and overall underwhelming gameplay. The only positive was the game’s visuals. In an effort to fix things Square Enix tried to patch the game, but in the end, they failed.

There was no other choice but to shut the servers down and Square Enix did just that. In 2012 the servers went offline while Square Enix worked on a new build of the game. Later that year they announced that they would release a new version of the game dubbed as the Realm Reborn: Final Fantasy XIV. While the original game was a disaster, Square Enix made up for it at least.


Xbox 360 Red Ring of Death

In an attempt to release the Xbox 360 before Sony’s overpriced PS3, Microsoft seemed to rush the quality check which caused a very problematic situation for the team. After a few weeks on the market, users started to experience bricked consoles with a red ring of light on the front button.

Well, as much as Microsoft was ignoring the fact that this was a real deal, more and more reports came in with the same issue. It took Microsoft a few weeks before they did research on this issue which revealed that the failure rate of the console was 45%.

It only then did they actually start doing something about it and release a repair plan where you could ship the console to Microsoft in a cardboard box known as the Xbox coffin. While this issue was bad for gamers who owned a console, it was a nightmare for the console manufacturer too as it cost them over $1 billion in the end.


Now read: Security flaw discovered in SSD design

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6 video game disasters we wish we could forget

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