Hottest Mess 2024: Community's Choice! (PICK 3)

I picked:

1. Concord: The amount of time and effort that went into making that game, which wasn't bad in any way, only for it to get quickly shut down because it didn't hit the ground running, is something I don't think has ever happened in video games. Sadly, it will set a standard going forward, making it even harder for developers and people employed by them in the long run. Could Concord have been saved? I don't know. But they could have tried something.

2. Ubisoft for having one of the worst years as a developer. The fact they seem to have it coming for covering up their corrupt practices, makes it look like poetic justice.

3. As someone who used to be subscribed to Game Informer for a couple of years, hearing that not only Gamestop killed the magazine, but deleted their entire archive of content is unforgivable. I haven't shopped at Gamestop for nearly two decades, and I'm glad I stopped supporting them the moment they started to get worse.

Honorable Mentions:

PS5 Pro. Some people disagreed with it being a hot mess. Well, thanks to Digital Foundry and others, it's pretty much proven at this point. The sharpening effect actually makes a lot of games look worse, not better. These things might be improved in the coming years, but it's pretty clear that the console didn't need to exist. Especially, when you have to buy the disk drive and a PS Plus membership separately for online gaming, adding up to well over 1K.

Overwatch 2. Basically, because Blizzard lied about the PvE modes and really just wanted to make the game F2P to begin with.

I went MS but I'm most curious about what the long-term effects of the Embracer fuckery will do to the industry. Still, MS going full evil this year is a huge fucking downer.

Went with Ubisoft, Concord, and Microsoft. It was legit tough to pick a third one because Microsoft being incompetent, Yuzu blowing up everyone's spot on the emulation scene, Nintendo's lawyers using Yuzu's stupidity to go after innocent parties, Gamestop erasing all of Game Informer from existence, the Steam stuff, and everything around Roblox are all options I considered.

Ubisoft shutting down XDefiant has been the one that made it surpass Concord to #1. Ubisoft having an already rancid year then shut down a game they threw a bunch of money at when everyone was already asking before launch why it existed in the first place was quite a look. They have no direction, no business sense, and seem incapable of actually doing anything that doesn't suck. They have good IP and a history of good games yet they stumble every time they release a game now. They seem completely incapable of having a clean launch for anything they release. Every game has problems in some way. Their leadership are incapable of learning and seem more concerned with covering up their bad behaviour than running a company. It's the video game publisher equivalent of that GIF of Sideshow Bob trying to walk through a parking lot full of rakes and stepping on every single one of them.

Concord is Concord. I talked about it a bunch in the previous thread.

Microsoft moved up to 3rd place ahead of Yuzu/Nintendo for me because it's now clear that they have no plan and are rudderless. Their decision to go all-in on their "Everything is an Xbox" strategy when their streaming service still sucks is a fool's errand that will probably fail, just like every other endeavour they've done recently. I had hoped they would have fixed their cloud streaming but from everything I've seen the last couple weeks, it's still barely playable for anything that requires somewhat precise inputs, including their Forza games, which when I lasted tried on Xbox cloud were basically unplayable because of both input latency and the stream not being able to keep up with everything changing on screen so much (issues other services like Geforce Now have solved). Add to all of that the appearance that the Game Pass content pipeline is drying up (at the same time that they're significantly raising the price for the service) and it seems like everything is crumbling over there. With how things appear to be going, if not for the golden goose in Activision that Microsoft purchased, I would bet there would be a lot more talks of them possibly getting out of games or becoming a publisher only. The only successful things to come out of the Xbox division in the last 5 years are things they bought and let continue working as is (Call of Duty, Blizzard, etc.). Anything Microsoft has actually tried to lend a hand with and work on has crashed and burned. Their leadership has somehow escaped any consequence for a decade (Phil having a fake "I'm one of you" shtick has somehow gained him a lot of leeway with the press even though everything he's presided over the last decade has either failed outright or fizzled out after being promising) and unless something drastic changes, I don't see Xbox's fortunes turning around.

Ubisoft, Microsoft and Concord. Microsoft and Ubisoft feel like they're in a tailspin of producing poor products. It's more surprising from Ubisoft who have spent the last decade turning lacklustre launches into games with long tails. For the company that made For Honour and Rainbow Six Siege to pull XDefiant so quickly is odd. Maybe they simply can't maintain more games for that length of time.

Microsoft simply haven't given me a reason to buy one of their boxes. Or make one of my existing boxes an Xbox. Flight Simulator looks cool but it's also a service tied to servers that will inevitably impact my experience of seeing the world.

Concord is just a baffling set of circumstances. Two beta periods that didn't hit followed by a launch window that lasted a mere 2 weeks. And yet, I don't know if it's the wrong call. How much would it cost to maintain that game for the small audience that wanted it? How much effort would it take to cultivate the numbers needed to make Concord profitable?

Ubisoft and the Concord situation maybe signify the end of those live service bets. I'd be all for that but it will leave a lot of business people scratching their heads wondering what could replace that void. Or are they still banking one one runaway success?

As for the PS5 Pro, I'm not sure it's a mess but it relies heavily on developers bringing the cool shit to the table. Sony didn't have a game to really sell the Pro with some fancy raytracing implementation or performance gains. Despite that, there are plenty of takers. People like new things.

Ubi, Microsoft, and Overwatch for me. What the Overwatch situation lacks in scale it more than makes up for in hobby-grade idiocy and a good dose of transparent duplicity. Ubi definitely wins the volume war, but what is up with Microsoft? Time to stop making decisions, Phil! There's no way in hell a subscription service can be sustainable (unless you are reeeally exploiting value out of developers), so the big idea for GamePass had to be that it was to entice people into the Microsoft ecosystem... but what ecosystem? The hardware that they are constantly downplaying? Their (the last time I checked) miserable PC storefront? Their stable of quality Microsoft-published titles? Phil's been pitching their year-long retreat as... well, as anything other than the panicked free-fall that is so clearly is, and nobody's buying it. But on the other hand, I kind of get it. Microsoft didn't have a present, so they instead tried looking to the future. The problem here is that they're in the games biz -- there might not be a future. There's no way to appear dignified while looking into that crystal ball.

I went with Concord, Game Informer, and Ubisoft. Ubisoft feels like the winner for the sheer amount of different littler messes adding up to one gigantic mess (edit: and the early vote has it well ahead), but Concord also seems pretty bad, so I guess we'll see. Voted for Game Informer because I'm basically personally offended that they wiped all the content from decades of work, that's just stupid and wrong, even though I was really never a GI guy.

I also considered Microsoft, but their mess is, I guess, just a little more boring, and moreover has been going on for years before this. It's like watching a train wreck in slow motion, and I don't think there's great reason to vote for them this year in particular (though I'll grant you that the optics of shutting down Tango and then saying they needed more games like Tango made was especially ridiculous). If this was "Mess of the decade," they'd definitely hang.

I considered Steam, because I've definitely been noticing the forums getting way worse over the years with the extremist trolls and such. But as @bigsocratesmentioned, this isn't really specific to Steam, the right-wing trolls have been emboldened almost everywhere, so I don't know that I can vote for Steam in particular here... although, man, it's close, it does seem noticeably worse than any other forums I've attempted to interact with.

Lastly, even though I didn't vote for it, the one I am the most personally annoyed by is Overwatch 2. I put something like 600+ hours into Overwatch, it was a truly awesome multiplayer FPS. Then Blizzard wiped it out and turned it into a F2P game with the promise of introducing PvE. Not only did the PvE mode never materialize, but I suddenly couldn't earn cosmetics at a reasonable rate anymore due to the new F2P mechanics in a game I'd paid good money for, and, worst of all, the change to a 5v5 team comp meant that the off-tank role no longer existed, which is what I primarily played (I mained Zarya). So after screwing around with it for a week, I put it down and never went back. Now they're returning (or already have returned?) to a 6v6 comp, but at this point I feel like the bridge is burned.

Oh, one thing I forgot to mention in my original post: if Ubisoft is a top 3 finisher (and it looks like very strong odds to do so at the moment), I pledge to create a bonus poll for Hottest Ubisoft Mess of 2024.

Also I'm kicking myself for not updating the Microsoft entry with the "This Is An Xbox" shit that is just so incredibly lame and strange. Definitely my 4th choice (I ended up going Ubisoft, Concord, and GameStop).

@atheistpreacher: That's what I really love about the Overwatch 2 situation -- they flopped not just on the PvE stuff, but on the entire structure of the game. I'm in a similar boat as you -- great time with OW1, mostly fallen off by the OW2 launch, and a support main with off-tank secondary. Maybe my Winston has a role in a 5-comp. We don't know. Frankly, we don't want to know! By that point it was clear the pro scene was the tail wagging the dog, and I caught the same smell of design desperation that had helped push me out of League of Legends years earlier. As for Microsoft, I think this year is important because the emperor finally showed us what was in the wardrobe. Not long ago, it was possible to believe that Phil had a plan and was trying to turn the Series Lemon into lemonade by leaning into the Heretical Truth -- that largely interchangeable meaty standalone set-top consoles might not be the future. Like EA pitching next year's Madden, Microsoft was willing to throw its console under the bus in the name of hyping up a Game Pass Future that may have already come and gone. Call it vertical disintegration, and Phil's running out of Jenga blocks to remove.

Daniel Li on Bluesky points out an aspect of Embracer's mess that I missed this year: Embracer bought board game publisher Asmodee, meddled with the company's successful formula, then saddled it with debt during the aforementioned split into three entities. As penance for my oversight, I will be splitting into ALL Corporation, Dinos & Friends, and The & Friends.

@allthedinos said:

That's gonna get messy, all three entities will be fighting over which forum posts they get to keep.

gamestop, ubi, and roblox for me.

honorary mention of Nintendo exercising patent rights that could fuck a lot of shit up.

Seems like a toss-up between Ubisoft and Concord to me, though at least Ubisoft is still alive and kicking and could figure out some way to turn things around.

Taking a broader look though, I do think Nintendo's legal actions have the potential for a bigger long-term impact than many of the other entrants for this year.

Like a lot of people, I went Ubi, Concord then Microsoft. There are so many others that deserve their spot at the top, but these 3 stand out to me.

Dishonorable mentions to:

Gamestop shutting down/wiping Game Informer

Yuzu and the ripple effect it caused to other emulators.

PS5 Pro

Of course, now Itch Dot IO is claiming that a farcical copyright strike generated by a brand-enforcing AI resulted in a total site shutdown, in a story that could have been a late contender for Hottest Mess. If you want to write it in, we have an honorable mention slot for that.

(Sorry for the lack of link, I do all but my blog posts on mobile. VGC has a story up about it, as I'm sure do other outlets.)

Here's the link

The important note here being that it's the fucking Funko Pop company doing the takedowns using a shitty AI tool. The tool flagged Itch (as in, the entire website) as a phishing scam and reported it to their domain registrar, whose automated systems took down the whole site before anyone could intervene. From the sounds of things, there was one thing on Itch that they voluntarily removed that might have caused the issue but because these AI tools suck, the tool just flagged the whole website and reported it instead of doing anything reasonable.

I feel like if Itch wanted to get feisty, they'd probably have grounds to go after Funko in court for this for lost revenue if anything. It's straight up negligence that caused material harm to Itch and all of the independent creators on the platform. If Funko wants to use those garbage AI tools, it should be their responsibility if the tool fucks up and does something it shouldn't. Obviously, if there was something on Itch that infringed on Funko's IP rights, they should have contacted Itch about it, not wiped out their whole website.

I was going to write in Veilguard being a let-down, but after reading that list..wow. I've been dealing with cancer since June, so I'm not "up to date" on all that's been going on. I didn't know about the Roblox and Steam news, but if those stories are true, Roblox.

I sure hope this happens, but I don't know what kind of resources Itch has for such things, and anyway I'm not holding my breath. Also, reading the article, I'm sure Funko would argue that Itch's beef is with their domain registrar. Talk about a shitty thing, though.

The PS5 Pro is Too Expensive to be sure but that still doesn't make it a hot mess and the games that look worse on it are largely up to the developer of those games to do a proper patch instead of half assing something.

Which is to say that since one of those is Outlaws anyway it's just another secret reason that Ubisoft is high in the running for this. (Plus I bought one and it works really well and I'm biased about it)

Anyway I went with Concord, Ubisoft, and Yuzu.

Yuzu is my personal grudge pick, though.