What was the Biggest Launch Failure of 2013

[Bertylicious]

Sim City would be my vote, with X: Rebirth following close second. Man that game is SHIITE

The man speaks the truth. Egosoft have never been good at launches but they have utterly shat the bed with Rebirth.

Given that neiher X:R or SCO worked on launch, that both had taken an ill-advised leap into new concepts that have proved to be somewhat bogus and that both have damaged their publishers reputation it has got to be one of those two.

I'm going to go with SCO as well because it was more of a telegraphed fail, with lots of previews and other stuff that I reckon pre-warned a lot of would be buyers to stay away. Egosoft managed to conceal just how bad their product was before suckering a lot of people, which let them shift more units (i.e. have a better launch).

Er, I would like to say at this point that I do still believe that Ego will stand behind X:R and that one day it will be a decent game but that might just be stockholm syndrome talking.

 

[Dragonbums]

If there's anything we can hope developers learn this year is not to rush their games out when they simply aren't ready.

Wishful thinking. It's like hoping after the vitriol that DLC piecemeal practices caused last gen, devs aren't going to do it this generation as well (which they will)

As long as they get the money first knowing that they don't have to fix much of anything during that time ala GTA V they will continue to release broken ass games and fix them later.


OT: Simcity.

Nothing could really top the absolute shitstorm that was SimCity.

Second contender to that fail fest would have to be Diablo III or whichever one had the always online requirement.

 

[Dragonbums]

Not a game, but feel like adding the Ouya to this list. So much hype and then...no one cared.

No game compares to Sim City though. Although that launch, in the grand scheme of things, will probably prove to be good for the industry since it shows that you just can't get away with that kind of bullshit.

To be fair to the Ouya though, these are babies when it comes to console distribution to be honest.

I'm not gonna go to hard on them.

Especially when 90% of the distribution problems came from shady distributors who fucked them over really hard in the coming weeks to the consoles release.

 

[teebeeohh]

sim city
everything else was maybe buggy but that game of broken by design and build in such a way that the problems only became really apparent after like 20+ hours(which is not much for a sim city game). it really felt like the designers could have fixed shit but instead decided to hide the problems, probably because they had a mandate to keep always online in

 

[Jandau]

Geez, this is a tough one... Well straight up, I think we can discount things like RTH: Retribution and Dark, since they are low budget crap that nobody really expected much from. This is mainly about games that people had high expectations for and had reputable dev studios behind them.

The big offenders seem to be Rome 2, Simcity, GTA:O and Colonial Marines. All of these games launched in a sorry state, some of them were/are borderline unplayable and they failed not only to deliver on the marketing, but even to deliver up to basic standards of their respective genres.

My own vote goes to Rome 2, as that was the only one of those game that I was really looking forward to. Shogun 2 made me believe that CA might have raised their standards for quality, as it was a fairly bug-free release and the AI wasn't as bad as usual. But Rome 2 is pretty much one of their most bugged releases and even bugs aside it has a ton of design decisions that are just plain bad, as well as some of the worst AI (both campaign and battle) that the series has seen to date. It's a poorly designed game that's riding on the popularity of the franchise and the love people have for the first Rome...

 

[Me55enger]

Can I vote we rollover Brink?

I think that launch deserves another year at the top.

 

[RyQ_TMC]

Sim City would be my vote, with X: Rebirth following close second. Man that game is SHIITE

Yeah, I always thought game design wasn't Ali Khamenei's strong suit.

Spoiler

I think I'll go with Aliens: Colonial Marines, with all that straight-faced lying to everyone and then childishly pointing fingers at everyone else involved in development to avoid blame. I'll keep Sim City as a close second though.

 

[Comocat]

I agree how people would think SimCity is a failure, but it is still going strong selling DLC and expansions. It's hard to argue that the biggest failure of 2013 is a product that is still making money for a company. It was a terrible launch, but I assume since EA is still releasing content, people must still be enjoying the game.

 

[DarkhoIlow]

Diablo 3 had it's problems in the first week but Blizzard managed to fix it quite fast.

Which leads me to Sim City which all may have stated before it was a failure.

 

[Atmos Duality]

I agree how people would think SimCity is a failure, but it is still going strong selling DLC and expansions. It's hard to argue that the biggest failure of 2013 is a product that is still making money for a company. It was a terrible launch, but I assume since EA is still releasing content, people must still be enjoying the game.

Yeah I was thinking something similar; Pre-orders suggest to me that financially, the game was a success.
(Which personally, I find depressing)

But then again, I'm unsure of just how much it all cost EA...this is the same company that stonewalled themselves out of profit for Dead Space 3. That, and I can't imagine many stuck around to "enjoy" Simcity's DLC given the game's rock bottom reputation.

(nevermind that the topic is specifically about LAUNCHES, and that additional content is moot in that context...but I still see what you're getting at)

 

[Zenn3k]

If there's anything we can hope developers learn this year is not to rush their games out when they simply aren't ready. This year's been marred by so many screw ups that should have been forseeable during development.

What game do you think messed up their launch the most?

I am still waiting for my RTW2 to be fixed, and my GTA online character to rematerialize.

SimCity (5)

A launch so bad, it ruined any hope the game had to gain an audience and as such has been basically completely forgotten by everyone.

 

[Comocat]

I agree how people would think SimCity is a failure, but it is still going strong selling DLC and expansions. It's hard to argue that the biggest failure of 2013 is a product that is still making money for a company. It was a terrible launch, but I assume since EA is still releasing content, people must still be enjoying the game.

Yeah I was thinking something similar; Pre-orders suggest to me that financially, the game was a success.
(Which personally, I find depressing)

But then again, I'm unsure of just how much it all cost EA...this is the same company that stonewalled themselves out of profit for Dead Space 3. That, and I can't imagine many stuck around to "enjoy" Simcity's DLC given the game's rock bottom reputation.

(nevermind that the topic is specifically about LAUNCHES, and that additional content is moot in that context...but I still see what you're getting at)

I hesitated posting a defense of SimCity because the launch was fairly terrible. But for me, a failure would suggest a negative outcome- it seems that EA made bank misrepresenting the game as an MMO, among other claims, and is still making money with DLC. Poorly executed, yes. Failure? Probably not.

I'm having a hard time thinking of games that "failed" because of terrible launches. It seems gamers are fairly used to buggy releases and the consequences of releasing broken products seem minimal. Maybe the Aliens game because word of mouth killed it so quickly would be the best choice. Another example I can think of is Mists of Pandaria (late 2012 release) which resulted in a decline in 1.3 million subscribers in the first quarter of 2013.

 

[Fractral]

Er, I would like to say at this point that I do still believe that Ego will stand behind X:R and that one day it will be a decent game but that might just be stockholm syndrome talking.

I agree that X:R will one day be a decent game, but where my opinion differs, is that it will be because of the modders working on the game, not Egosoft. Egosoft will just bumble along while the modders do the real work.

How bad is it, exactly, compared to X3AP? I was really really looking forward to it since I've played all the X3 games to death and back, but then the day before I was going to buy it I heard it was shit.
More specifically, can you still do the trade empire thing? The removal of the menu based trading really put me off buying it- yes, the menus from X3 were horrendous, but once you got used to them (10 hours of teeth pulling) then they were actually pretty functional.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

In terms of launching a broken product/getting bad press, SimCity and War Z are both contenders, with Rome 2 a distant runner up.

In terms of almost killing your studio with a poorly received product, it has to go to Defiance. Hugely expensive MMO, bad reviews, crap sales, massive fall off in players after a single month. Almost killed Trion.

 

[major_chaos]

How bad is it, exactly, compared to X3AP?

That really depends on how much you liked AP. If you are like me and thought X3:AP was glacially paced waterbording that was absolutely unplayable without the mod that lets you teleport across sectors then Rebirth has some promise once the bugs get sorted out. On the other hand if you are one of the people who unlike me, enjoyed the "select target-> autopilot: dock-> engage SETA-> read book" nature of X3 then you will probably hate Rebirth just for its smaller scale and faster pace.

 

[smithy_2045]

Anyone who doesn't say Ashes Cricket 2013 is wrong. How many games get cancelled after they're released?

 

[ShinyCharizard]

Everything released by EA. It seems to get worse by the year with them lol. Clearly not giving their devs nearly enough time to actually finish their games.