Nintendo’s Wii U announcement
The announcement of the Wii U itself wasn’t all the bad. The hardware looks interesting and the E3 presentation itself was competent enough. What was an issue though was how confused everyone was left. The name itself, coupled with the fact that the controller was the only thing on display at E3, caused many to see the Wii U as little more than a controller add on, rather than a completely new console. With the lack of clarity and confidence in the Wii U, Nintendo’s shares began to lose value fairly rapidly in the weeks following their E3 conference.
The year of DLC forgetfulness
It’s a big enough fail in itself that the online pass and day one DLC have become such strong and regularly used methods of hushing second hand game sales. It’s an understandable, if annoying element of the current gaming client, but one that all too many developers were making silly mistakes over in 2011. We see the free copy of Battlefield 1943 offered with PS3 orders of Battlefield 3 forgotten, missing Catwoman DLC codes in Batman: Arkham City etc. All minor inconveniences on their own that have happened one too many times in such a short span of a few months. Let’s just hope that publishers can get their acts together in good time for the big releases of 2012.
Deus Ex and OnLive marketing
Up and coming cloud gaming service OnLive were looking for a blockbuster title to help bolster their rep, and what better title than Deus Ex: Human Revolution? It was thus that copies of Deus Ex on PC were going to include a free voucher for an OnLive version of the game. GameStop took it upon themselves to remove the voucher however, going on to sell it as a separate fully priced item. You can try and justify it all you want GameStop, but that’s just sheer greed right there.
The PSN hacks
An obvious, but necessary, entry to any list of gaming industry blunders of 2011. For such a blatant security flaw to exist is cause for concern enough, but for credit card information to be compromised and for Sony to keep quiet about it for a whole week after the incident occurred is pretty embarrassing. Sony made an admirable attempt at reconciliation with a variety of gifts given to those effected by the PSN hacks, but it isn’t exactly the kind of mistake that you just forget about.
