Hottest Mess Disappointed Me This Year

I think the fact that it was talked about and made the top 3 was enough for me. Yeah I think it should’ve won but it’d be a different thing if they ignored it completely.

I think I would have preferred if they came out up front and said 'Issues around labour and harassment are obviously huge problems for the industry and comparing that to issues around buggy games isn't appropriate so won't be included as part of this category'.

I completely agree with the OP. As someone who (a) was part of the Telltale shit and (b) has actually played Fallout 76, there's no comparison. Fallout didn't ruin anyone's lives. I realize that ultimately these lists are just for "fun" and it doesn't really matter, but to put the industry stuff on the list and just to have it lose to a mediocre game feels pretty shitty, and only serves to reinforce the attitude that games are more important than the people who make them. (That being said, I wasn't expecting anything different and I suppose I should just be grateful it was talked about at all.)

I thought that the scale and scope of the Fallout 76 mess is just comically massive in comparison to releasing a game. It doesn’t seem real. It’s just absurd.

The pre-orders for something-something Fallout, E3, the pre-apologies, the pre-order bonus snafu, the game itself, the influencers getting something like the pre-order bonus, the post-apologies, the re-post-apologies, the make good that can’t even get you a virtual bag they didn’t send you, the ticketing system information leak...

You could make a movie about this.

I get that the other topics are more serious and impactful. They’re larger scale and societal. They’re also big problems stemming from big business.

Fallout was a single game launch that spawned a thousand PR nightmares. It’s a lot of shit that can be pointed to one pipeline. It’s absurd how hard that launch (and early support) was bungled.

Also, like others have mentioned, I think Please Stop was the more “serious issues” category, whereas Hottest Mess was always a moment to laugh about more lighthearted issues. I guess this could have been avoided with more categories...

I like Fallout 76

Looks like they're going for Hottest mess in 2019 too with their rum they sold. $80 rum bottle that is a plastic fallout shell over a cheaper bottle. Gotta give their PR guy props for his fancy talk for plastic tho.

@bezerker285: And I guess Bethesda just trademarked Deathloop.

Maybe that’s the Fallout 76 marketing ARG.

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/bethesda-parent-company-trademarks-a-new-game-call/1100-6464107/

I think the issue is that, because GB bundled all these developers' issues into one entry for the category, it became too big a problem for a GOTY discussion to cover; a "greater scope" problem of bad labor practices that looms over the entire games industry and most of the world in general. It demeans the scale of the problem to try to call it the "Hottest Mess" of a year.

If the different cases had been kept separate from each other, any one of them could've competed with Fallout 76 for Hottest Mess (though that game is such a mess, it maybe would've won anyway). But bundling them together meant that 76 pretty much had to win by default because it was the only choice that was actually in the spirit of the category (The plagiarism stuff was too small potatoes, and IGN handled it so effectively that it's not really a hot mess).

It's not saddest mess or most important mess, the Fallout debacle had layers and was such a continuous dumpster fire where every couple days there was some fresh new fuck up they were trying to move past. Bad corporate culture and mistreatment of developers is just more corporate shittiness, which is a known quantity at this point. The way they handled those situations was a mess, but it was more sad, infuriating, and way too predictable than how I interpret what they're going for with "hottest".

I kind of agree.

Sure, Fallout is a hot mess, I think it belongs to the category as is and it keeps on giving to this day (many things, like the time it would take Bethesda to replace the bags, weren't considered because they happened *after* the discussion), but even that is small potatoes compared to some of the cases out there. If anything, I think it was a disservice to bundle all shitty work practices in the same bag, because they are not the same and having it all under a "work conditions" umbrella tends to normalize things that were highly abnormal. With all due respect to those involved, I can't equate what happened in ArenaNet (a couple writers being fired for being confrontational in social networks) or Rockstar (massive crunching being considered normal) to what happened at Telltale (hundreds of people loosing their livelihood, their insurance, their whole job support in a single day and without warning. Someone even being root out of the country because his working visa wasn't valid, a week after he was hired and has moved).

Sure, some things happen all the time in software development. Projects get canceled, entire teams are layoff or transferred after some benchmark, people are overworked dry because of weeks long crunches, but even with that background, I think the Telltale mess was on a different level altogether... a borderline illegal level. It can't be normalized in a "boys will be boys" kind of attitude.

I can almost sneer at the whole Fallout thing. How every design decision they took seems like the wrong one, how some people thought it was ok to spend 200 bucks in such an obviously flawed idea, how their philosophy of poor quality assurance has leaked into real life items and customer support systems, and how their good will was destroyed when they kept shooting themselves in the feet... On the other hand, there is nothing to sneer at the Telltale situation.

I haven't gotten to that one yet but I more or less agree. It would have been cool to use that category to make the point of the issue itself, which is that one game being busted, no matter how ridiculously it is busted, cannot hold a candle to the issues that affect the people that live and work in this industry and culture. The way certain people insist "no but me the gamer/consumer instead" has and will continue to suck whole ass and my disappointment is just the missed opportunity to call that out even more.

I can also see how apples and oranges those picks got and so chose something more straightforward in the form of a single game example. The end result ends up coming off a little weird and I think it's more than fair to point that out. Although I trust that they're aware.

@hermes: I would go so far as to say that if Telltale had an outspoken, confrontational, and egotistical boss like 38 Studios had back in 2012, it would've been a bigger contender for this category. That's the thing I kept thinking about with Telltale. The situations aren't identical, but it really made me think about the 38 Studios disaster from 2012 with how sudden, how severe, and how unexpected it was.

Not related but, I can't believe the 38 Studios shit happened 6 years ago, it feels like a billion.

Well, I think in the spirit of the category, hottest mess is kind of a combination of the fuckups and how poorly the aftermath is handled. The unethical everything in the workplaces is kind of a known slow moving issue that has been around for years and will be around for some years to come. It only bubbled up to the surface slightly more this year, and got more recognition, but wasn't exactly messier than before. And the companies and media generally handled it pretty ok. Not great by any means, especially since things don't seem to have changed much. But it wasn't messy either.

F76 however is just this clowny mess of fuckups, unforced errors, errors causing new errors. Lies, shortsightedness, poor communication and messaging, unlucky circumstances. And it hasn't even been meaningfully resolved for how pointlessly stupid it all is. That entire situation is a HOT MESS. And I think it deserves to win the category based on that.

Though all that said, I am glad the workplace ethics got their place on the list. I don't think the mess is hot in the same way. But the severity and context of the events make it powerful enough that it needs to be recognized as THE major issue in the industry.

I think the reasoning is because bad labor practices could be put in the category every year, and it’s an ongoing issue, but this year has been the most transparent with the issue.

The hottest mess should also be something that was a big deal popularity wise too. Knowing about the working conditions of devs is pretty niche, while Fallout 76 was a widespread problem that millions of people know about and probably hundred of thousands are affected by. I barely heard about some of the stuff that the OP mentions.

"...GB crew put Fallout 76 over the exploitative labor practices of Rockstar."

Well, it is Hottest Mess not biggest crime against humans this year. It is about messiness and a grouping of unexpectedly agonizingly provocative screw-ups. Fallout 76 is a, slapsticks slip on the banana peel, of a mess. The sheer amount of errors and gaffs the studio had to create makes it fit the category than that of very serious issues of labor paracties. The other description of this idea is a 'train wreck' or 'cluster fuck'. But when I say train wreck, or this was the worst train wreck; you would not get angry if I didn't say, "2018 Yilan train derailment"*.


* On 21 October 2018, a passenger train derailed in Yilan County, Taiwan, killing 18 people and injuring 187.