Poll Hottest Mess 2023: Community's Choice! (PICK 3) (68 votes)
Note: I haven't listened to the GOTY podcasts yet because I'm still trying to finish Alan Wake 2, so I don't know if the team has done a Hottest Mess category at some point. Regardless, this is one for the community.
2023 was a mess. A lot of the mess was stuff that makes paying attention to the video games industry a grim exercise, with layoffs, abuse, harassment, wage theft, and threats to future livelihood rampant in the news throughout the year. Games media also suffered greatly, with entire outlets shutting down (RIP Launcher and Waypoint) to exacerbate the problem of an enormous pool of talented writers with no clear future for their profession. Giant Bomb itself suffered its first-ever layoffs, though it's fortunately still standing. Tam was half-joking when he stated on a recent Bombcast that 2023 was the worst year ever for video games. Personally, I think it was closer to the worst year than the best for all of the reasons I described.
This trend in the industry has been cited by the GB crew (past and present) as a reason to drop Hottest Mess as a category from GOTY. As I noted last year, I still really like thinking about the more lighthearted messes (although some of the candidates are still very heavy), so I wanted to create this poll for the second year in a row. I posted about the candidates in the summer and in September, if you would like some additional background.
Voting: Pick up to 3 entries to vote for; obviously you can vote for more but I would prefer you didn't. The exception to this is the "Other" candidate - I'll count anything that receives a comment, as long as it doesn't fit under one of the other 20-something entries.
Results: As with most GOTY categories, the plan is to have one winner (whichever candidate receives the most votes) and two runners-up. I'll also add two honorable mentions: one for the candidate that received the strongest opinions, and another for the most-suggested candidate left off the list.
Timing: I haven't thought this through yet, but I'll circle back in mid-January to post about the winner, runners-up, and honorable mentions.
The Candidates (links and more description):
This is copy-pasted from September's update, with some editing and additions.
- Bungie (specifically for Destiny 2), which made a desperately unpopular starter pack, made questionable decisions around its microtransactions, and blamed layoffs on its players.
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, which is so addicted to being an annual series that it needed to piggyback off of MW2 to launch, yet still somehow exceeded 200 GB in a full installation. They ended up fixing the piggybacking issue only to require the new game to launch Warzone, which is arguably worse.
- Crime Boss: Rockay City, which looked virtually unplayable at times on UPF.
- Dark and Darker, which allegedly stole assets from Nexon and was delisted from Steam.
- The Day Before, which finally launched after a lengthy delay and is kind of a disaster.
- E3 2023, which was cancelled after a questionable attempt at resurrection, and hopes look very slim for it ever returning.
- The Embracer Group's leadership: (takes a deep breath) after the company hemorrhaged value as its acquisition strategy faltered, it shuttered studios during major embargo lifts to avoid attention and paying health insurance benefits, then began shopping properties it so lustily acquired a couple years ago. There have been other layoffs and closures threatened in the last few months, but I think you get the point. Oh, and their leadership was "discharged from liability" for their stupid mistakes.
- The ESRB wants to add face-scanning tech to allow you to play games, which has privacy rights advocates salivating over potential lawsuits.
- Golden Joystick Awards, which replaced a speaker that planned to address the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza in their remarks.
- Hyenas, which was cancelled before release despite being the most expensive game SEGA has ever developed.
- Jirard "The Completionist" Khalil, who allegedly misled charitable donors during Indieland and later stepped down from the charity.
- The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, which made Blight Club in the same year it was released and caused an entire studio to give up on making games. The apology later may have been written by AI as well.
- Microsoft and Sony, which failed Redaction 101 by accidentally uploading unredacted documents and using a bad Sharpie, respectively.
- Minecraft servers, on which classified US Military documents were leaked and caused mainstream news outlets to clutch their pearls at the very notion.
- NVIDIA RTX 4060, whose value was ridiculously poor for its price and performance.
- Only Up!, which was delisted from Steam due to art asset theft (via AI).
- Overwatch 2, which cancelled its PvE Hero Mode and arguably its reason to exist as a sequel, and was review-bombed on its Steam release as a result. Overwatch League, which provided the main driver of the game's release, folded as well.
- Payday 3, which experienced an extremely rocky launch.
- PC ports riddled with bugs, most notably Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and The Last of Us, Part 1. NBA2K24 was temporarily the second-lowest rated game on Steam ever for using a last-gen port as well.
- Redfall, which flopped right out of the gate and experienced single digit player counts.
- Silent Hill: Ascension, which is a goddamn mess in both microtransactions and content. Shout out to Jess for continuing to investigate this catastrophe.
- Sony, which is removing the right to watch purchased content for hundreds of TV episodes and movies.
- Square-Enix, which lost a staggering amount of value despite the success of Final Fantasy XVI.
- Starfield, which can't stop replying to negative Steam reviews by suggesting the reviewers aren't playing the right way.
- Switch Ports, which between Mortal Kombat 1 and Batman: Arkham Trilogy are having a rough go of things.
- Twitch, which changed (or attempted to) its payouts and branded content permissions.
- Twitter, whose slow-motion implosion affects game developers / publishers / media as the outreach and safety aspects of its platform deteriorate.
- Unity changes how they monetize, receives an enormous backlash, backpedals on some of it while clarifying it's probably worse than you think, and causing developers to seriously consider switching platforms or taking their games offline to avoid the charges. They also demoted their CEO to "guy inexplicably hanging around until next April" while laying off hundreds of workers.
- Winter 2023's live service game graveyard, where a dominant game format began to meet its end.
Good luck deciding between these extremely worthy candidates.
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