Let's Talk Gaming Launch Disasters

Now this made me want to read up on what happened but I cannot remember the name of the company but they were showing the chairs off at shows and there was major hype and I think they went bankrupt before launch can anyone remember details?

I don't know much about it, but isn't the Sega Saturn regarded as a failure purely because of its launch? I think it came out whilst most games were still in development for it because Sega didn't tell developers they were bringing the release date forward.

Was that the Konix Multisystem? I have vague memories about it from back in the day...

That’s the one!

Trying to get an online race in Test Drive Unlimited was near impossible for the first couple months, and I thjnk was still flaky throughout, but it was glorious when it did work.

They fucked it in America by limiting distribution to select retailers, thus alienating those left out. On top of this they didn't build up to a launch, they just announced that it was available one day. Then Sony undercut the price by $100 and the rest is history.

I’m still waiting for a sale price I think will be worth it for a game that looks so determinedly 6/10. I’m all for more Mass Effect and in theory it sounds ok but everything I’ve seen and read sucked all my enthusiasm away.

Back in simpler, less flashy E3 times:

Andromeda followed by Anthem was a hell of a launch-disaster pairing. Production on both got Aaryn Flynn (who was in charge at the time) fired, and even though Bioware went out and had actively re-hired Casey Hudson, he didn't last that long after Anthem either.



FWIW I think Andromeda is still an above-average CRPG, just one that launched with horrible problems, and has a milquetoast/insipid cast compared to most Bioware games. Sadly I think it's better than, say, The Outer Worlds.



Other great launch disasters I've experienced:


Ultima 7 - How about that for a blast from the past! U7 was absolutely buggy and horrible at launch. It was the first game I ever actually had to seek out a patch for, luckily a friend had got it somehow, off a cover-disc or down via the early internet.


Asheron's Call 2 - AC1 was pretty amazing early MMORPG, so hopes were high for AC2. It had tons of good ideas - in fact like 70% of the things people credit WoW with, maybe more, were in AC2 (which came out in late 2002), including instanced dungeons as the norm. But bloody hell, it was a shitshow at launch, it wasn't even near ready, it was incredibly buggy and unstable, and just totally unplayable for weeks/months, without being so exciting people stuck around anyway.



Cyberpunk 2077 - Actually wasn't that bad for me. I got given it on PC, and it was... pretty decent. It didn't perform or glitch or bug out much worse than Skyrim did at launch, and probably was slightly less outright buggy than FO:NV for me. But it was undoubtedly a disaster because of the console release.



APB - I played in the open beta and I could tell this was going to be an amazing shitshow and it absolutely was. It barely ran, it wasn't very exciting, and they'd just put in so much shit that made it annoying to play rather than fun.

Final Fantasy XIV - My wife got in the beta for this, and oooooof. Well good thing they completely tore it up and started over, I guess that's all I can say. Not only was boring as fuck, and just really painful to play, but it also barely ran (sensing a theme here) despite not-that-impressive graphics, and had huge lag and other network problems.


World of Warcraft - So weird one, because it was ultimately successful, but the launch? Wow. I got it day 1 US (tried to get midnight release, but literal actual hooting and hollering frat-boys had bought the last copies at the Walmart which had told us they had some - a real American experience for this Londoner there, my then-gf now-wife driving us around in northern Indiana), and I'd say for the first month it was basically not playable. Oh you could log on. You might even get to play normally for 30 minutes an hour, maybe even two hours. Then something would happen. Usually with the loot server and/or the world server. So you'd be unable to pick up items, or all the mobs and NPCs would vanish, and players would move erratically and sporadically, whilst the chat server kept working. Or one entire continent would crash but not the other - hope you had characters on both! After the first month most of this was fixed, but it took literally a year to fix the whole thing (continents kept crashing occasionally until like 2012), and then another year to improve WoW's responsiveness - it used to be less responsive than other MMOs, but before they were done with Vanilla it was more responsive (and was until quite recently - it still is more responsive than stuff like GW2).



I know there are a bunch of other ones I'm forgetting. Plus like, so many MMOs which I played, and I could just tell, this was going to have a straight diagonal downward line over the next 6-12 months for the playerbase. Some of those actually had kind of smooth launches, which I have a complicated theory might actually be a bad thing for an MMO, but that's for another day.

Sony are great at that. Look at the fucked up xbox one launch as well. Compare... well I was trying to find the xbox one launch stuff where they had that complicated flowchart of how to lend a friend a game but Google is shit these days and no matter what you type it thinks you want gameshare. But it was a shit original idea...

With

youtu.be/kWSIFh8ICaA

I do have a price point in mind that I think it’s probably already near or has hit in the PSN sales.

It is a fiver in CEX

I suppose there was the 3DO M2 too. Lots of hype about how it would beat PlayStation then only a limited arcade release in the end. I do actually have the arcade one with Polystars though.

They turned the story round completely but FF14 was a bust on launch. Same with the Master Chief Collection. Tech issues, problems with matchmaking, I remember at the time it was widely panned with people wondering how they could fuck it up so badly.