For the first time since 2017, the hub of negativity that traditionally kicks off this site’s annual look back is condensed to five entries. That’s almost entirely thanks to a brand-new list that goes live tomorrow and needs the space, but the kinds of disappointing news and trends that tend to make the cut are also kinda easy to categorise in bunches this year – for the most part. And that means we can also get it out of the way quickly to focus on the good stuff.
As has been the case for many years now, this is a petty personal list first and foremost: it does not tend to cover anything from the (depressingly long and ever-present) list of examples of people treating other people without basic human dignity within the movie or games industries. If I couldn’t use this page to complain about first-world problems, the list wouldn’t exist and we’d just be focusing on positives the whole way down. That said, time to get some things off my chest.
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VR BEST OF 2023 DISCLAIMER
This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. If you agree with me 100%, go buy a lottery ticket. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.
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5. Curse of the 7s
As plenty of writers were eager to repeat over the course of 2023, it was a bad year to be a publically accepted “7/10” videogame. Before you dismiss that statement as always true anyway and scroll on, remember a 7/10 videogame is not a bad game: it just usually appeals less to players not usually invested in the genre than an 8 or 9 might. Virtually every year my top games list includes a couple of examples where critical consensus and I do not meet, and those paragraphs are often my favourite to write.
But oh boy, this was definitely not the year to be one of those games.
When your competition for people’s free time is the latest Final Fantasy, Street Fighter, Diablo or Zelda, any perceived flaw strong enough to knock you below 75-80 on Meta/Opencritic will always hurt more. In the case of Exoprimal, one of my most anticipated games of the year, that flaw was the lack of any sort of party matchmaking (a blow that would’ve landed the game its own spot on this list any other year). For The Last Case of Benedict Fox, it was a cluttered UI and just a few too many frame drops on the Xbox Series S. For Atomic Heart, an overly chatty sidekick and a failure to capitalise on a strong opening. For Immortals of Aveum – an otherwise impressive Unreal Engine 5 visual showcase with super-slick production – it was a script too eager to ape the modern Marvel movie formula. In the latter case, as well as many others no doubt, the result was the slashing of a talented and promising development team, and when poor release timing is to blame it just feels so cruel.
4. Nintendo’s Wild Patent Spree
Though it never goes down well and usually happens as stealthily as possible, major videogame companies looking to stave off competition by patenting in-game mechanics is nothing new; famous examples include the Nemesis system from Warner Bros’ Middle Earth duology and Namco’s long-standing exclusive ability to run minigames on loading screens. But Nintendo’s 2023 patent application streak for mechanics within Tears of the Kingdom raised more than a few eyebrows when it came to light that the company wanted to own (or take payment for) things as banal as riding a moving object without physically interacting with it, or a fast travel preview on a loading screen.
From one tiny angle this makes sense: you can imagine games like Immortals: Fenix Rising and Genshin Impact scaring the Kyoto bigwigs with some of their direct inspiration from Breath of the Wild. But, like, come on man. A gaming world without a company as big as Nintendo doing its own quirky thing would be unbearably dull (especially with the current sedate state of Sony), but that doesn’t mean the folks at the Big N should own every innovation they come up with – let alone ones they do not. That’s hardly the way to a better industry, and honestly this kind of attitude makes me worry that the current Nintendo upper management might not believe they can continue to conjure up more weird innovation in the future.
This is meant to be a trend-focused post, so while we’re talking about Nintendo-adjacent disappointments:
- The mass disqualifications at the Pokemon World Championships thanks to eleventh-hour changes to how team-building rules are enforced didn’t make anyone involved look good at all;
- Though expected, forewarned and unfortunately kind of inevitable, the definitive closure of the 3DS and Wii U eShops back in March was a grim reminder of the limitations of digital storefronts – and Nintendo’s own distaste for letting people play their old games on new platforms.
3. Unity goes 100 to 0 in One Headline
This one isn’t a trend; it’s just one jaw-dropping, tone-deaf power move. It was perhaps the most unexpected, seemingly out-of-nowhere financial choice in the history of independent game development, and certainly the widest-ranging negative news story in that space for years: in September of 2023, the widely-used engine developer announced they would charge a flat 20 cent fee per install (not per purchase) of every game that used – or had ever used – their engine, applicable retroactively on any game that has reached a certain threshold of popularity, whether or not that game actually costs people money to play, starting from January 1st 2024.
This move understandably went down like a lead balloon throughout the industry, as that kind of flat rule has the potential to screw over all kinds of developers, especially the smallest ones. Of course it was the people behind the biggest Unity games, such as Genshin Impact, that led the push convincing Unity to walk back this proposal, which now no longer applies retroactively, changes the install requirement to an option-based profit share model, and will only apply to games with over a million dollars in revenue behind them.
However, there can be no doubt that Unity is now a much less attractive option for aspiring independent developers than it was before, and wider trust in the brand has been shattered. 2023 was an awful, awful year for videogame industry layoffs and job losses in general, and the desire to solidify incoming funds is understandable, but this was not the way to go about anything; the upper management team at Unity will likely regret that announcement for the rest of their careers.
2. Xbox’s No Good, Very Bad Half-Year
It’s exceedingly easy to dismiss at the very end, but not since Nintendo’s 2016 has a videogame console maker had such a rocks-and-diamonds year. Xbox may be riding high at the time of writing following a string of mid-late 2023 successes – the powerhouse post-E3 showcase, the photo-finish closure of the Activision-Blizzard-King purchase, the July Square Enix deal, the launch of the well-reviewed Starfield and Forza Motorsport, a great showing at The Game Awards – but for much of the year’s first half “doom and gloom” didn’t even begin to cover the tone of the punditry surrounding the console scene’s green corner.
After an amazing January developer showcase that laid out the year’s first-party games in remarkably clean style – dropping Hi-Fi Rush on us without warning in the process – the next few months were oddly quiet. Sure, the promised Game Pass partners arrived – Atomic Heart, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty etc, but not much else that was new. For the first time in years it felt like XGP was missing all the indie games getting buzz, as the likes of Pizza Tower and Dredge passed the service by. Months rolled on without almost any customary monthly surprise announcements; it seemed like the energy around the brand was seeping away. Then in late May the UK Competition and Markets Authority blocked the proposed deal for the Activision etc buyout, setting up months of the spiciest news, leaks and revelations seen since the Epic vs Apple mega-lawsuit. And then came Redfall.
A buggy, feature-light and by-the-numbers shooter lacking any of the agency-first magic for which developers Arkane have always been praised, Redfall took the tag of Xbox’s first $120 AUD ($70 USD) videogame and sent it up in flames, prompting waves of pessimism around the industry enhanced by years of mainstream frustration at Microsoft’s glacier pace when it comes to major exclusive releases. The end of this awful months-long stretch – either its turning point or its nadir depending on who you ask – came when a clearly-stressed Xbox head honcho Phil Spencer went on the Kinda Funny Xcast and gave one of the most astonishing interviews the industry has seen in a long time, earning plenty of new admirers but ruffling even more feathers.
1. Painful PC Port Predicament
To hear enthusiasts tell it, 2023 was supposed to be the year the PC gaming space took advantage of consoles leaving the last generation behind to take a technological leap forward in the triple-A visual presentation arena. And I was as keen as any to be a part of that, as the possibilities of playing on PC hardware have never been more exciting to me. The increased quality and variety available on PC Game Pass, greater support for niche controller features and ultrawide displays all around, and real competition in the handheld PC realm make the excitement palpable. And yet when I first booted up 2023’s Resident Evil 4, I had inexplicable crashes and lock-ups for weeks before a patch allowed me to play the game without (the wrong kind of) fear. Meanwhile, my friends were finishing the game on consoles.
But my issues were just an edge case; by that point in the year we had already seen much worse widespread issues affecting the PC versions of Wild Hearts and (unfortunately for the timing of that excellent HBO show) The Last of Us Part One. And then the shit really hit the fan when Star Wars: Jedi Survivor landed to an absolutely furious reception from the fanbase. The game launched in a sub-par state on all platforms, but the PC version was by far the worst, riddled with bugs and refusing to run at any playable frame rate even on top-end hardware for a significant number of players.
Starfield‘s PC version later made headlines for rougher-than-expected performance, although that was probably as much to do with new-gen-console-base optimisation challenges as it did the typical expected Bethesda jank. Alan Wake II faced a similar situation a month later, but its developers were far more upfront about the demands of such an intensive visual presentation. Regardless, 2023 was not the year that the PC sphere confirmed itself as the definitive place to play the most expensive new games, and that sucks.
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Honorable Mentions
–Alan Waves Goodbye to the Disc
Speaking of Alan Wake, Epic Games’ decision to forgo any kind of physical release on consoles – a first for a single-player triple-A release of its kind – really stung, especially with the dismissive ‘get with the times’ statement Epic used to justify it. The game’s sales appear to have suffered as a result, and that’s pretty rough because – not to spoil a later list – the game is prettttty good.
–The Game Awards Wave Off Their Winners
The highly-successful Game Awards show celebrated its tenth edition in 2023, and in terms of both the scale of announcements and the justice of the award recipients, it might have been the best show yet. However, I hope next year the people behind the winners are given more than 30 seconds onstage to properly celebrate such a big moment – and also that awards as big as Best Indie Game are given the full fanfare they deserve.
–E3 Waves Goodbye for Good
The writing was on the wall for a long time, but this year we got to read two separate “E3 is dead” headlines months apart from one another. The first one cancelled the 2023 event, the second cancelled the show for good. Best of luck with Summer Game Fest, Mr Keighley.
–Overwatch 2 Waves Away It’s PvE Campaign
Alright, guess I won’t play the game then.
–Playstation’s No Good, Very Bad Week
This extremely late mini-horror streak is kind of still unfolding at the time this page is published, or it would probably go on the main list. In the meantime, the first half of this SkillUp video covers the Naughty Dog cancellation/Insomniac leak/Bungie drama pretty well.
–I Just Realised This List Has No Movie Entries
Eh, it happens.
Vagrant Rant 