7 Humiliating Backpedals from Publishers Over Terrible Ideas 

"Don't you guys have phones?" Is one that comes to mind

You could make it a long form video called “101 ways companies destroyed player morale and then somehow made it even worst”

@@Ahrpigi is it terrible decision if Diablo Immortal ended up being profitable as fuck? Sure, there was public backlash but Blizzard ignored it and got money out of it. Looks like a fat W for corpos to me.

@@exploertm8738 profitable doesn't make it not a bad idea, kinda like landlords, over reliance on fossil fuels, and tax cuts for megacorps and billionaires.

​@@exploertm8738 Yes it is still a terrible decision.

Pre-orders should be illegal for digital games. At least all the ones without at least a week of early play, what's the point of paying more for the same game with a few extra in-game bits I can buy later if I get to play it on the same day everyone else does?

"I'll augment your pre-order!" Yep, sounds like a threat!

It's also very funny because the apology is essentially for the game being shit.

I mean, there is one ring, right? Not like there are others?

@@sacrificiallamb4568 It turns out that three were given to the elves (immortal, wisest, and fairest of all beings), seven to the dwarf lords (great miners and craftsmen of the mountain halls), and nine (nine!) were gifted to the race of men (who above all else desire power). So a bit more than just the one.

@@GibusWearingMann Don't forget the many, many minor rings that elvish smiths all over made too!

​​@@GibusWearingMann No no, you forget, for they were all of them deceived, for another ring was made. Deep in the land of Mordor, in the fires of Mount Doom, the Dark Lord Sauron forged, in secret, a master ring, to control all others. And into this ring he poured all his cruelty, his malice and his will to dominate all life. One ring to rule them all.

Oh, damn, I had no idea they had patched that. I kept using the trick of keeping a save at the very start of the game to keep the items.

I didn't know they backpedalled this. Thinking it was 1 use ever (I never paid money but I got a bunch free from deus ex go and the other side material things) is a big part of why I never went back to MD after beating the main game. Not even for the dlc which I'd already paid for.

And they removed the ability to purchase the game from those countries and still haven't fully restored access to some players

Also the steam store page has never been updated and still states a psn account is required.

I wish they'd dug deeper into the layers of the controversy, though I understand they had to condense it. Because, as mentioned, PSN wasn't available everywhere. Thus, a large chunk of people who had already bought the game and been playing for months would have lost access simply because they couldn't sign into PSN. And thus, it wasn't just review bombing. Several people boycotted playing. Plus there were demands for refunds to the point that Steam and Sony butted heads over the entire issue. The community had a rallying cry of "We dive together or not at all."

​@@TheTaurenification Yeah, it's a weird situation. I get Sony's decision from certain business perspectives since it made things a lot easier for them to monitor the game against hackers, bots, etc. (TF2 controversy anyone?,) but, at the same time, they really should have looked more into what this would mean for people in countries where the PSN isn't allowed and/or considered alternatives so this wouldn't become absolute pr nightmare in case things went wrong (which it obviously did.)

@@TheTaurenification "not available everywhere "meaning it is available in 73 out of 195 countries worldwide (Edit:going by the UN classification).

Thanks to No Man’s Sky, it’s now the entire industry that plays that long con

@@MegaZeta Hey now, NMS has long redeemed itself while proving to be a surprisingly long lasting purchase that doesn't force you to buy things for some kind of extended experience. As much as it sets a precedent for such habits, I wish more follow through at least and work on fixing their janky hyped shit

"This is, of course, to help the gamers make their controllers last longer by making them push less buttons and find new and creative solutions to gain altitude."

Former EA guy who was responsible for the whole Unity debacle once went on record saying it would be a good idea to charge people to reload their weapons in the middle of a firefight in multiplayer. With not a single shred of self awareness or irony.

"That's simply incredible!" - Apple's Tim Cook, as seen on many SAMTIME videos

Que jump-less speed runs.

​@@Crocogatorhe had awareness. Just not about what a terrible human being he actually is.

Did you not see all the mentions of Overwatch in the Diablo entry?

That wasn't so much a "oops let us actively step that back and issue an apology", it was more them just stopping to do that in the future after doing it multiple times over several months.

yeah but i don't think they regretted that decision or reverted it due to backlash - i think they knew it'd hurt their longevity to continue to lock the hero behind a paywall. they want the longest flow of income

The problem is probably partly that they have many more bad decisions for the game that they haven't backpedaled on.

The worst mistake was making Overwatch 2 entirely redundant and pointless. People downloaded it hoping for the PvE single player campaign. They eventually admitted they just dropped it, changed it to 5v5, and you have to suck it.

"How often can we fit the word 'game' into this one sentence?"

This is my problem with E3 and other gaming conventions. Speeches filled with just uplifting jargon and pointless freedom statements. How many times did he say "powerful"? When just describing sitting down in your pants playing CoD.

I love it when pr implying the game's lack of focus and depth is somehow in my interest because I can experience it however I want to. Like not doing their job and DESIGNING a gameplay for me to experience beyond "point at da bad guy shoot at da bad guy crouch in grass where are-a tou" is somehow a favor to me. It's like being a mexican and hearing about how great mc's fries are because they have no spice and seeing everywhere starting to sell fries with salt, sugar and msg.

Who cares? There is no matchmaking filter so have fun with a filipino who ignores the team lol

​@@ghostface5559 A lot of people care.

@@ghostface5559 The people living in the blocked countries who bought the game definitely care

​@ghostface5559 the people that don't have a PS5, that bought a game on PC, that were not informed they needed the PSN account on PC, that lost access to the game because Sony does not allow accounts to be created in the previously listed over 100 countries, that have paid for this game and still cannot play it to this day. Feels like a lot of people should, and do, care. Just because you're apathetic towards your gaming brethren being screwed over doesn't mean we should agree with you.

@@KahranRamsus 99% of the people who review bombed it don't care anymore, they're too busy patting themselves on the back

I see what you did there….well played

What do you get when you cross an owl with a bungee cord?

Yeah, I feel this. Think the cords snapped for me which is a real shame.

Ngl, same

If studios have gotten good at doing anything it's the white text on black backgrounding thing. Just that. Of course you should feel even more insulted because they don't even have the decency to use different font.

I'll take "Things both video game publishers and the American Republican Party say" for $400, Alex! Oh, sorry, I forgot for a moment that Republicans never ever apologize for their racism, they just double down and lie some more when called out.

Yep I had honestly never clocked they always do this white on black. This was a revelation tbh and the best/worst hallmark...

i hope they keep using the way he said that, every once in a while.

@@chilomine839 Time to bring back text adventure games!

My dad’s a veteran and he still plays on PlayStation

Or get a proper job?

actually, don mattrick said "we have an offline xbox, it's called the xbox 360".

@@VelvetMetrolink Huh? Did you reply to the wrong comment or something?

​@VelvetMetrolink so government work isn't a real job?

I think they've used that one already

Supprise mechanics

I've got that T-Shirt!

Ah, I remember that one well. Literally the most downvoted comment in Reddit history.

To be fair, that's lowhanging fruit to the point of digging it out of the ground lol

Yup. Bonus points, those countries would have been able to play even with PSN. They would have marked another region like they had been doing for over a decade. Heck, customer support used to even quiety suggest it. But now, Sony games are unlisted entirely for them. Well done, Helldivers community.

My guess is Sony (whose products I try to avoid) saw Microsoft pull that stunt with the Halo games and copied it. Forgetting that most of us who use Windows have MS logins whether we want them or not. Dumb, but since when did multi-national corporations with too many fingers in too many rich pies not defy common decency and good sense?

We wanted to give players a sense of pride and accomplishment.

And one of their entries will be this video

I remember seeing that notice from sony/playstation. It was pretty funny. Microsoft got smacked back down.

Sadly, that only applies to Xbox One. The Online requirement is now enforced on the Xbox Series consoles. If you have a disc that actually contains the entire game, like the 2019 reprints of Spyro Reignited Trilogy that contains the Accessibility Patch on the disc, you can install it on the Xbox One even if you have no internet. But on Xbox Series, the system will throw the License Error message if you attempt to install it without internet.

IIRC, there was a whole 10-20 min video from the Xbox One announcement con describing how to lend/sell games to your friends. 13:48 is a clip from the hysterical PlayStation response ad campaign “How to lend your PS4 games to your friends”

​@@xenolinguist"Never interrupt you opponent when they are making a mistake. Capitalize on it and clown all over their faces instead."

They are entirely detached from reality tbf, a Sony CEO recently told the staff they fired to "Take a year off at the beach" instead of being angry.

“90% of studios shut down their shitty live service games right before they make Fortnite money” -execs

mike rowe-transactions?

Haha. Noice

​@@soulreapermagnumEvery purchase the former host of Dirty Jobs is a Mike Rowe transaction.

They screwed over all the good will they had from the 360.

hope you're not in too much pain and you heal up soon. Had root canal on Monday.

@TsiolkovskySportingLocks I'm doing alright, thanks! Mouth is super sore but I'm getting there. Hope your recovery is going alright, I've heard root canal treatment is horrible

They're going to sell it to us as DLC for $9.99 per backpedal.

They are resisting.

I’m going to form a complaint 😤

They're trying to distract us with additional videos on different subjects it seems

@@hannahmae676 Demand the other 115! XD

That one was a special kind of stupid.

What's worse is the potential price increases for Indies that use Unity. Yooka-Laylee was originally $40, but Playtonic Games would definitely charge $70 for Yooka-Replaylee just to offset the Unity Runtime fees.

yeah its a shame how they weasled out of that despite not walking it back at all, was super excited for helldivers cause i played the original but when this all went down and we saw that nothing actually changed from the backlash i went back to old games again

They did back pedal the requirement, and they're not selling it in areas where people could previously buy but not legally play it. That's still an improvement, if not the best possible one

For those who weren't there, Ghost Recon Breakpoint was initially marketed as a hardcore survival game, and then turned out to be a terrible live service looter shooter RPG*. Needless to say, us Ghost Recon fans were not happy with that bait and switch in the slightest, which led to Ubisoft pushing an update that basically walked back all of those mechanics to make the game slightly resemble the advertisements. And that was one issue fixed...out of a dozen others.

It still has drones, it’s not fixed.

Then Ubisoft tried to add NFT gear to it.

Not to mention the whole "women can't handle the pressure" comment when asked if there would be female character models.

I somehow have started watching cruise ship videos and they keep calling going to watch the sun set "sunsetting" it throws me every time. 😅

HE CANT KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH THIS !

I hope i am not rude, but what is Kefka's syndrome?

@anna.owo. It's a rare, untreatable genetic disorder that only affects 0.01% of children born to parents who played Final Fantasy VI when they were young.

Wizards' mishandling of the OGL fiasco nearly gifted Paizo the entire tabletop industry on a silver platter.

Fun fact though! They're looking to find a team to make BG4

@@benn454 Which is especially funny since their first OGL mishandling during the transition to 4e was what drove Paizo to make Pathfinder its own system in the first place.

@@adamzielinski5213 Oh, the owners of DND always get stupid when their stuff gets popular. 2e, 3e, 3.5e, 4e, all of them have had aspects where corporate exects get too excited and end up ruining everything.

What's truly tragic is that I know many people who were still excited when the latest PHB came out. Goldfish-like memories, I swear...

Best part is the PSN requirement is now on their single player games that don’t have online content. FFS 🤦

They could at least be nice enough to do what Epic Games Store does and lure people in with free games every week to get you to sign up. It seems to have worked, because they're still doing it.

Most likely to datamine PC master race and try to use PSN for game purchases instead of through steam. So, money reasons.

To ensure that players cannot cheat by any means; If they resort to cheating, their PSN accounts will be banned immediately. This anti-cheat strategy worked with Gran Turismo Sport, and it's also working on Gran Turismo 7, which is why Sony is doing this on all games on Steam.

My guess would be to add an in game store that doesn't involve Valve taking a cut of the sales.

Agreed. The blame is always on the producer, where it belongs, as they have the money and power. Devs are doing what they're forced to do by their corporate owners

Why not blaming both :D

More like 700.

Guys like these comments so they can update the video

They did both roll back the requirement and delisted the game in territories without psn

Judging what the Xbox community has been saying about Phil Spencer, it sounds like those two did maintain a strong competitive spirit that made collaborations with their competitors impossible. If they stayed: 1. Crossplay on Minecraft wouldn't have happened, and may not exist in general. 2. Both Banjo and Steve wouldn't appear in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, and both Crash and Spyro wouldn't make cameos in Astro Bot. Who would've replaced them all is anyone's guess. 3. All of the Rare developed games wouldn't appear on Nintendo Switch Online, with Goldeneye's rerelease on Xbox prevented by Nintendo yet again. 4. While Xbox games would still be released on PC, they wouldn't be on Steam and instead available from the Windows store. And even if they did, they would be playable only on Windows (sorry, Steam Deck owners) and require a Microsoft account to access the Windows store as a launcher. 5. Xbox titles would also remain exclusive to Xbox and not available on Playstation or Nintendo hardware. Those that were released on those systems before their corresponding publishers/developers were acquired by Microsoft would be removed from store shelves and delisted on Playstation Store and Nintendo eShop.

It's indicative that Sony should release 64 new live-service games, of course! At least that's what executives would probably conclude after seeing how live services are so popular and always in the zeitgeist.