Hottest Mess 2023: Community's Choice! (PICK 3)

I voted for Embracer, Unity, and Silent Hill: Ascension. What a year.

edit: when I wrote my original post it said pick 2 so I'll add a third.

My picks are Unity, Embracer, and Overwatch/Blizzard. Embracer's whole shtick looked suspect from the start and now we know that there was no plan beyond getting Saudi money, which didn't happen. The Unity thing had widespread ramifications on tons of different sectors of the industry and even after their walk backs still have lost the trust of a lot of folks. Overwatch's current state is a great summary of how bad Blizzard has been the last 5 years. They've basically fumbled everything they've done since around 2018 (Other than maybe WoW? I don't follow that game at all). They had to sacrifice other studios just to get the Diablo II remake and Diablo IV out the door since both were huge messes. The only Blizzard games that have sustained well have been games that the community themselves have handled running like the Starcraft games. Every time Blizzard tries to get involved with running tournaments and stuff it doesn't work.

Runners up:

• The live service graveyard. This was always the concern with the live service game trend. If every game is a forever game then none of them are because there aren't enough people who like these types of games to keep that many ships afloat.
• Twitter's slow collapse, which I think overall is a massive issue but this isn't a game-specific thing. Twitter falling apart is harmful to a lot of people in a lot of different areas. I was a frequent Twitter user until March when I finally gave up and deleted my account. I just couldn't handle it anymore and most of the people I cared to read posts from had also left the platform. You can't have a platform that big, fire the entire content moderation staff, and expect the platform to continue to function. From everything I've heard the platform is a bot-infested wasteland now
• Microsoft in general. Between their messing up redacting legal documents and several of the games they bankrolled (Redfall, Starfield, arguably Forza as well) not living up to expectations, they haven't had the best of years.
• Nvidia's increasingly blatant greed when it comes to their GPUs. It wasn't just the 4060. Outside of their top tier cards, their price to performance ratios for all of their new "cheaper" GPUs were pretty iffy and the minor performance gains over the 3000 series did not even close to justify the increase in price.

Not sure if this stacks up to other happenings this year but IGN just updated the story about The Day Before from studio Fntastic having a disastrous launch. It has apparently been catastrophic as the entire studio is closing due to massive financial financial failure just days after release. Ouch. It doesn't sound like this game was at all what was promised but wowee did that crash and burn fast. Pour one out for the devs who I hope don't struggle too hard as we navigate the holidays into 2024.

Rough way to end your year for sure.

Edit: Oops. Missed that this was already a thing in the other thread.

I still think that Unity tops it, with Embracer desperately trying to claim the spot, but I mean there's a few weeks left for them to Embrace More.

Hard time picking a third to be honest, there's a lot of Great options.

@efesell: I picked COD as the 3rd just because COD is so big. A lot of these messes are just "single game is not very good and has some drama" but COD is almost an industry unto itself. Should the COD edifice collapse (which it has not yet) it would shake things up far more than Gollum flopping did.

I voted for Embracer, The Completionist, and my write in is industry lay-offs I mean what the fuck.

@spacemanspiff00: It has been delisted.

This may not be the messiest mess because it's kind of a small game despite being the most wishlisted Steam game for a bit, but it's arguably the hottest because of how quickly things are moving.

Also while I guess I feel sorry for the frontline developers (assuming there were any, since this company exploited volunteer labor) but this game is looking more and more like an intentional scam. I do not feel sorry for studio management here.

@bigsocrates: I have since read more details about the studio and perhaps there is few, if any, that we should feel sorry for. I wasn't aware of the game being a possible scam. I remember hearing it was some MMO thing and that was enough to lose my interest. Quite the clusterfuck, indeed.

It sucks too that it does more harm to the early access model, which I don't engage with anymore, but have watched a number of great projects come out of it and had a great time with. Subnautica comes to mind.

@spacemanspiff00: Hades is one of my favorite games and came out of early access. Baldur's Gate 3 was early access. The model usually works when you have developers with credibility and reputations to maintain (Peter Molyneux notwithstanding.) And of course there are examples of games from unknown teams that were early access and turned out pretty good in the end. That does happen.

But for every Hades there are a ton of games that never finish or come out of early access or others that come out incomplete. There are a lot of games that are either scams or that don't get enough money to continue development or where the developers just don't have the skills and experience to properly finish the games. I think overall early access has not been a good model, at least on a game by game basis (better games get more money so maybe most early access purchases by dollar volume work out okay.) There need to be more quality controls.

This pretty well reflects my thoughts. Unity and Embracer really do seem like the obvious answers. In the end I just voted for those and didn't pick a third, because nothing else jumps out in comparison. I was unsurprised to see after voting that both are currently sitting at over 80% while nothing else has broken 25%. Others I considered:

• E3 is definitely a mess, but it has been for years now and at this point it's not any kind of surprise, everyone has more or less given up on it.
• Twitter sure is a hot mess and Musk just let Alex Jones back on it, but all of that is only tangentially related to video games.
• Seeing those unredacted documents from Microsoft and Sony was fun, but I don't know how hot of a mess it really was or how much lasting damage was actually done. The inner thoughts of those execs and the future plans of those companies is all stuff we could have guessed at.
• Sony removing the ability to watch purchased content is definitely a mess, but it feels like most people were smart enough not to buy that stuff for fear that something just like this would happen, much as happened with Stadia.
• I was personally disappointed about no Overwatch 2 PvE because that's the part of the game I was interested in, but it sounds like Overwatch 2 is still doing fine, so, eh? And overall, the failure or broken promises of a single game just doesn't really hold a candle to the wide-ranging implications of the Unity and Embracer messes. That goes for a lot of the other stuff on this list.

So, yeah, it seems like we've just got a pair of runaway winners in the Hottest Mess category this year. Should probably just call them the co-winners. Whatever comes in third will be only the worst of the rest.

EDIT:

If I had add new candidates, two come to mind:

• Games journalism layoffs/closures in general. That just keeps getting worse. If you want a specific one from this year, I'd point to Vice/Waypoint Radio, but there have been others. Obviously not a new mess by any stretch.
• The Game Awards being a show that doesn't give a crap about awards and reserves most of its time for announcements/reveals/trailers. I saw a lot of justified grousing about winners being rushed off stage, and many awards not even being given on stage at all. One might say that if video games in general want to be taken more seriously as an artistic medium, they should first take themselves more seriously by holding an actual celebration of excellence in games, rather than put on a three- to four-hour infomercial.

Picking only 3 doesn't seem to be possible given what a dumpster fire of a year it's been in the game industry. Man, everybody thought the pandemic years were going to be the nadir, and the first year where things are mostly back to normal, that's when the balloon pops and everything REALLY goes to hell.

I feel so sorry for all the people who got screwed over in various ways this year.

I didn't catch that you could pick 3 and I picked 1. Whoops.

Although I deleted my Twitter account several years ago for my sanity I know the importance it had in the day to day communication for anything in life and to see Elon Musk seemingly to do just about everything in his power to make it irrelevant was shocking.

My other two would be Unity and Embracer. Way to try to leave your mark on Video Games.

Not easy to pick just three, but I want the official list to be honest, so I went with:

1. Unity

2. Jirard, lying about the Indieland donations to charity and possibly also committed fraud.

3. Call of Duty III, being released as a full $70 game, when it should've been DLC for a lot cheaper. And the story campaign, finishing the remake trilogy, being bad, making the whole story pointless. This on top of the horrible space requirement issue to install the game.

Runners up:

1. The PS Plus huge price increase, especially, when the games they've added since the announcement have not been great when compared to Game Pass. You forgot to add this, so I guess it would be "other".

2. Square-Enix overestimating their game sells and then whining about it later.

3. Blizzard's dishonest making of Overwatch 2 and the huge backlash as a result.

4. Nvidia's overpricing of the budget RTX 4060.

5. Bungie, blaming the players for them firing employees and punishing them by delaying The Final Shape expansion.

The Day Before mess gets messier.

I mean it's still not impactful but damn if it isn't trying to win. A real dark horse effort!

And thus endeth the day before, Hilariously there have been people buying keys at inflated prices on the gray market who will now be SOL for a refund on whatever they paid. Hopefully they will either make their streaming bag quickly or they knew this was coming and just didn't care. Either way, in terms of pure localized hotness of messes this is the hottest small scale mess we've seen.

@av_gamer:

1. The PS Plus huge price increase, especially, when the games they've added since the announcement have not been great when compared to Game Pass. You forgot to add this, so I guess it would be "other".

I mean this could be a topic in itself, outside the bolded which is subjective. MS took away the game pass yearly payment option early in the year from console then increased the price a few months later, shortly before Starfields release they temp removed the free trials. We also had console price increases from both, more than once from Xbox in places like Brazil, not counting Xbox delayed theirs for PR points.

I voted Unity, Embracer, and my write-in would be mass industry lay-offs.

If I was picking a winner, it would be the lay-offs. The industry brought on all this staff during quarantine, and at some point, because it always does, the other shoe was going to drop. But it doesn't make it any less heartbreaking even if we all could see it coming. I have a friend who works at a large studio. Nothing like hearing him say, "It felt like my office got Thanos-ed."

But oh boy the Unity stuff........

Forgot to add my Other vote, but it was just going to be:

"The Entire Video Game Industry for collectively laying off over 9000 people."

Unity spent more than a decade turning their brand image from "the splash screen you see before a terrible game that runs badly" to a legitimate alternative to engines like Unreal. The effort and expense this took cannot be overstated, we are talking about millions of man-hours of work building good will that was torched with a single press release.

Every other thing on here was the sum of many smaller decisions over a long period of time.

Unity, Embracer and Starfield.

I know Starfield's a small fish in this sludge pond but it's staggering a game of that size (THAT SOLD THAT FUCKING WELL) is resorting to fake reviews, removing negative ones and generally being condescending towards a paying audience.

I think Embracer is the winner but i think i'm just used to publishers and parent companies destroying good developers, we've been watching it happen since the beginning of video games we're just reaching new impressive scales.

So i voted the Unity disaster, granted they walked back the changes so it's not a huge deal anymore, but when it happened it scared the entire industry into investing into alternative engine options which has never happened before and even caused some Unity developers to leave in disgust, the future might be brighter because of it especially for fresh new indie devs who will have valid free options but the short term damage was immense.

Unity would later go on to shut down Weta Digital which they paid so much for and seemingly did bugger all with, what a shit show.

Hey everyone, I'm planning on posting about the poll results this Thursday (January 11th). Thank you if you've voted, and there's still time to vote if you haven't.

RE: layoffs - I'll definitely post about them (since they've been discussed a lot in these comments), but the gist of it is that their jersey has been raised to the rafters already. It's definitely the throughline to a number of candidates, and what we may end up remembering most about 2023, but it's also firmly in bummer territory.

One final note: I think since I posted this poll, Unity has laid off literal thousands of employees and Embracer closed more studios. The Day Before dev also announced its closure mere hours after I posted as well. I'm sure I'm forgetting other recent updates, but it's crazy how messy 2023 was right up until the ball dropped on New Year's.