Top 10 Worst Game Industry Choices

The Top Ten
1 Mass release of a horrible, over-advertised game (1982)

The release of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial Game pretty much ended Atari. It was horrible and over-advertised, which caused a huge game market crash the same year.

2 Releasing a console when there are already three on the market (1998)

The Dreamcast was a great console, but with the GameCube, Xbox, and PlayStation 1 all out simultaneously, it didn't last long and led to the demise of SEGA hardware.

Sega should have learned a thing or two from Atari. Atari might have been the first to make great mistakes, but Sega repeated them, and that is worse.

Nowadays, if you release a console to compete with Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft, chances are it's going to be doomed from the start.

3 Letting a great system idea go to the competition (1991)

Nintendo told Sony to make them a CD-based console but gave up on the idea. So, Sony made it for themselves, calling it the PlayStation.

4 Supporting a cloud platform with no solid income (2012)

OnLive was ahead of its time, but it had high operating costs and not enough income. It went bankrupt and was quickly bought up by a new company.

5 Explaining a system's DRM wrong (2013)

At E3 2013, Microsoft's Xbox One conference went badly. Sony used Microsoft's bad DRM as a chance to win more people over.

6 Immediately launching a console out of fear (1995)

SEGA released the SEGA Saturn before the PlayStation in a hurry. This led to bad sales, no advertising, and a lack of places to sell it.

7 Making people pay for something they had already bought (2012)

Capcom released Street Fighter X Tekken, but the DLC was already on the disc people bought. It led to outrage over the idea of not owning something you legally purchased in the first place.

8 Buying a rival company at peak (2012)

Zynga bought OMGPOP in 2012 for Draw Something. The game immediately lost 5 million users, and revenue went down significantly.

9 Sega mocking Nintendo (1986)

Sure, Sega was supposed to be "rad and badass," but Sega does what Nintendont? There's no such thing as bad publicity, and Nintendo soon gained followers simply because Sega was using terrible methods - not because it hurt Nintendo, but because it led to Sega's own demise.

10 Nintendo shutting down a Super Smash Bros. Melee tournament and canceling a Splatoon 2 tournament at the same time (2020)

Ever since I heard about this incident, it left me with so many questions and speculations. How was Nintendo even aware of The Big House tournament to begin with? Does Nintendo have some sort of watchdog that scouts for unauthorized Nintendo content on the internet using metadata? Does the watchdog's alarm sound whenever it finds an unauthorized Nintendo project?

I have these same questions regarding what happened to SuperMarioLogan and AM2R. I bet Nintendo was worried that these things were going to make a profit without their approval. While Nintendo continues to make fan-pleasing games, they take down fan projects that can surpass the quality of Nintendo's own games.

It's either that Japan has strict rules regarding piracy, or that Nintendo caught the Microsoft bug and started caring solely about profit. I bet behind these happy colors, Nintendo is being run by a corrupt, capitalist, and evil monopoly fueled by wealth, greed, corruption, and bribery.

Sorry if I am being too harsh. I was writing this at the time of the 2022 World Cup and I felt like comparing Nintendo to FIFA, the latter of which has an entire Netflix documentary exposing all of the corrupt scandals and desires that shaped FIFA. Again, I apologize for going off-topic.

But to bring it home, it was wrong of Nintendo to take down a fan tournament, and they should take a hint from the fans.

The Contenders
11 Awful DRM requirement (2013)

First, Ubisoft forced you to go through its horrible DRM agreements for every game. Not anymore, but EA also started doing it.

12 Nintendo hiring Sony to develop a CD-ROM add-on, then canceling the project, which eventually became the PlayStation console (1986)

Nintendo wanted a CD add-on for their SNES, so they hired Sony. Then they abandoned Sony to join Philips CDI, leaving Sony with a "half-finished console." It was this CD add-on that would later become the Sony PlayStation, the rival that would one day be the end of Nintendo.

Thanks, Nintendo. I still love you for those good old consoles, but everyone has to admit you really screwed up here, as it was Nintendo that convinced Sony it was appropriate to move into the video game industry. This is almost incredible in more ways than one.

13 A virtual reality system that causes headaches, seizures, and eye strain (1995)

I don't even need to explain this one. You all know what I'm talking about.

14 Xbox One announcement (2013)
15 Pac-Man for Atari 2600 (1982)

Pac-Man for the Atari 2600 was horrible, yet Atari produced several million copies of the game. This, along with the far worse mistake of the E.T. game, are the main reasons Atari fell.

16 High-school company structure (2013)

Valve had been hit with recent layoffs, with the newly unemployed stating how the "undesirables" were purposely laid off.

17 Censorship on gory games (1992)

Nintendo, why did people hate you for creating cheap games with no blood? Aside from the fact that the MK Genesis version was so bloody, but the SNES version wasn't, what's wrong with your publicity for censoring gamer dreams? Screw you, Nintendo, for hurting yourself.

18 Lame publicity (1994)
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