7 PC gaming scandals you forgot about

Like any industry that’s been around as long as the gaming industry has, games have had their share of scandals and controversies. There have been things that went horribly wrong, some that are still going badly, but there’s so much happening in gaming (and the rest of the world) that it wouldn’t be surprising if you forgot about them. But it’s good to remember the scandals and the controversies, if only to be better equipped when history inevitably repeats itself.

7

Batman: Arkham Knight’s PC launch

This one definitely didn’t make you feel like Batman

We’ve seen plenty of bad video game launches over the years, and we’ll get to more later in this list, but Batman: Arkham Knight’s absolutely abysmal launch on PC stands out for a few reasons.

The game was in such a bad state that Rocksteady and Warner Bros. pulled it from sale just one day after it launched. It didn’t come back to Steam for four months, and even then it still wasn’t fixed. People who played it on a console, of course, don’t remember any of this. Instead, they remember the Batmobile tank missions and predictable story. PC players would have at least liked to make it to a Batmobile tank mission without the game crashing, or at least at a stable framerate.

After years of fixes, it now has a ‘Very Positive’ rating on Steam, so it wasn’t all bad forever. But that Warner Bros. pushed out the launch version at all seems to be a decade-old indication of how WB really does seem witless in the role of ‘games publisher.’

6

Kerbal Space Program 2

Why is this game still available to buy on Steam? Is anyone still working on it?

This is one of those bad situations that is still going wrong. After the smash success of Kerbal Space Program, a sequel was the obvious next step in the minds of executives with dollar signs in their eyes. Unfortunately, development on the sequel did not go the way anyone wanted it to.

Development kicked off in earnest in 2017 under Star Theory Games, though they wouldn’t see the game through to its early access launch in 2023. Intercept Games, a studio purposely founded to take over Kerbal Space Program 2’s development, would take over in 2021. Intercept Games got it out the door in early access, and a year later, the studio was shut down by its parent company, Take-Two. We’re now officially two years out from Kerbal Space Program 2’s early access launch, but we don’t know if anyone is working on it, and it’s still available to buy on Steam for $50 USD.

Both games were published by Private Division (another subsidiary of Take-Two that was shut down at the same time), but if you were to still buy the game now, it’s not Take-Two who benefits from you being out-of-the-loop. It’s a new company formed by former Annapurna Interactive developers and their partner Haveli Investments. The developers who walked out of Annapurna last year turned around and picked up Private Division’s portfolio, including Kerbal Space Program.

If they are actually working on the game, then they should make that clear. If not, it should be pulled from sale. Even if they are working on it, it should still probably be removed from sale for the time being, because it is currently an unplayable mess. It’s easy to forget that Kerbal Space Program 2 is still out there, in the sea of games that are available on Steam. And the dark red ‘Overwhelmingly Negative’ marker on the game’s recent reviews definitely helps to deter those who might not be aware of the situation.

The road that Kerbal Space Program 2 has been on is seemingly one of constant disappointment, and I understand that the former Annapurna devs are still trying to get their house in order, so to speak. But the fact that it’s number 2,641 in top-sellers on Steam means that someone, somewhere, is still buying this game, when it may very well have been entirely abandoned.

I would love to hear that it’s still being worked on, and it would be great to see it make a real comeback. However, in its current state, there’s definitely a huge ethical question around whether it should remain available for sale in its current state. At least if it sticks around until June 2025, then Steam’s new ‘warning’ about early access games that haven’t been updated for a full year will also be indicated on the store page as well.

5

Newegg selling Gamer’s Nexus a broken motherboard

As if finding PC parts wasn’t bad enough

If you really want a full breakdown of what happened here, then it’s worth watching the videos that Gamers Nexus made about the whole thing. You can even find all four of them in a handy playlist. The long and short of it is, though, that tech and PC hardware retailer Newegg sold a motherboard to Gamers Nexus which it had already tried, and failed, to repair. Basically, it sold a product known to be broken as if it had been fixed; but the kicker is that Newegg then tried to say Gamers Nexus actually broke it, and refused the refund request.

It started with Gamers Nexus purchasing a motherboard that it didn’t end up needing by the time it arrived. No harm no foul, as Gamers Nexus editor-in-chief Steve Burke explains at the top of the first video. That’s not the first time something like that has happened, and it probably wouldn’t be the last.

This time, however, one of the more mundane occurrences in running a YouTube channel about tech and PC hardware turned into a four video-long saga, beginning with Newegg claiming that Burke had in fact damaged the motherboard, and refusing Gamers Nexus the $500 refund they were owed. It ended with Burke actually flying to Newegg headquarters, to sit down and speak with Newegg executives about how this could have happened in the first place, and what Newegg will do to ensure it doesn’t happen to Burke, or anyone else, again.

Whether you choose to believe in or trust Newegg going forward is up to you. But this scandal is definitely one to remember every time you’re looking for any kind of PC or tech hardware.

4

38 Studios $75 million loan from Rhode Island

Just because you play certain kinds of games a lot doesn’t mean you can make them

I mean, of course you can try. That’s what Curt Schilling did with his creation of 38 Studios, and his dream to conquer the MMO space with one game to rule them all. Schilling, who was a star pitcher in the MLB for a number of years, fell in love with MMO’s after he started playing them on the road between games. He was a big gamer, and by the time he retired from the MLB, he had more than enough to kick-start his own studio.

38 Studios was founded, and from the beginning Schilling did his best John Hammond impression and ‘spared no expense’ when it came to recruiting top talent, office space, equipment, everything. It was a bold strategy from Schilling, who, again, had only really just played a lot of a certain kind of video game. Sure, he hired people that knew how to make video games. In fact, because he was so adamant about getting the best of the best, they were able to make and release a game at all. The problem, of course, was that Schilling tried to be the person running that video game studio, a job that he was in no way prepared for.

Unfortunately, the story of someone with too much money starting a video game studio and then finding out it’s tougher than it looks isn’t anything new. That’s where Schilling’s $75 million loan from Rhode Island comes in.

The studio’s main goal was to make its world-dominating MMO, code-named Project Copernicus. If you didn’t know, MMO’s are pretty big games, and they aren’t the sort of thing you can make in a week. Whatever Copernicus would have been was always years away, even when the studio filed for bankruptcy in 2012. In the meantime, though, it was able to make a single-player title, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning.

38 Studios had been running out of money for some time, leading up to the launch of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. When it was released without setting the world on fire, it became unavoidably clear that things were going badly. Schilling and 38 Studios missed a loan payment to the state of Rhode Island, laid off the whole studio, and just three months after Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning launched, filed for bankruptcy.

Years later, we got Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning, and the game was given another chance to shine and stand on its own legs. The fact that it is as good as it is, again, goes back to the only thing you could say Schilling got right, which was hiring some pretty darn good artists, writers, and game makers. A nice way to close the loop on an otherwise sad story.

3

iBUYPOWER’s Counter-Strike match fixing

You can buy power, but not wins

Source: CSGOVODs

Looking back a decade once again to one that some esports heads might remember, iBUYPOWER’s match-fixing during a Cevo Season 5 match in 2014. Sports are no stranger to betting and match-fixing, so it was realistically only a matter of time before it happened to esports. Sports fans may be aware that these scandals can happen, but it was a fresh experience for the esports world, as one of the biggest North American Counter-Strike: Global Offensive teams in the game was caught, and publicly called out by Valve.

Valve’s blog at the time the investigation ended in 2015 did not mince words when naming each player involved and instituting their ban. Valve made crystal clear the stance in the esport industry about those attempting to wet their beak this way, saying “Professional players, their managers, and teams’ organization staff, should under no circumstances gamble on CS: GO matches, associated with high volume CS: GO gamblers, or deliver information to others that might influence their CS: GO bets.”

With the title of the blog being “Integrity and Fair Play,” it rippled throughout the esports world as a public display of condemnation and humiliation.

2

Cyberpunk 2077‘s horrendous launch

It’s easy to forget just how bad it was, now that it’s all patched

Firstly, let me start by saying that all credit to CD Projekt RED for taking the time to fix Cyberpunk 2077, even going beyond just fixing its technical issues, and fixing some deeply ingrained design problems with the game’s progression system. It’s great that CDPR stuck with the game, so all credit to them for that. But we cannot forget just how bad this launch really was, and what made it so categorically worse than other bad launches of big games.

Time plays a big factor here. The very first time CD Projekt RED announced Cyberpunk 2077 was 2012. It’s also important to remember that when it was revealed, the PS4 and Xbox One hadn’t even been released yet, so these were still the ‘next-gen’ consoles on the horizon. Cyberpunk 2077 would be a next-gen title, and of course it would also launch on PCs everywhere.

Fast-forward 8 years and 3 delays, and it wasn’t even out before the ‘new’ next-gen consoles, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, were out and on shelves (or in scalpers’ homes). It arrived on December 10, 2020, sold millions in pre-order sales, and it was simply unplayable on the platforms it was first announced for. Even on the latest and greatest PCs, it was a buggy mess that made even high-end machines scream.

I’m not saying CD Projekt RED is a bad company. I’m just saying we need to remember the context beyond it just being buggy at launch, and that while CDPR has done well to fix Cyberpunk 2077’s issues, we won’t really know if CDPR has made meaningful changes to avoid what happened with Cyberpunk 2077 until it launches its next game.

1

Blood II: The Chosen

A tragically common tale that still made an impact

Source: Atari

What happened with Blood II: The Chosen breaks down to an unfortunately common and tragic occurrence in the gaming industry. To put it simply, the game was launched far before it was ready to do so, pushed out by GT Interactive, who held the rights to the game, while Monolith Productions was the developer charged with making it.

GT Interactive went against Monolith’s advice to hold off on launching the game, released it when it wasn’t ready to be launched, and then when it did poorly, GT Interactive dropped the Blood franchise all-together. Monolith, as an independent developer, did not have the funds to fix a game that they didn’t even own the rights to, and one that they wouldn’t be seeing profits on. So Blood II: The Chosen remained in its poor state, with Monolith bearing the brunt of GT Interactive’s failings.

It’s upsetting because, for its time, the original Blood game was an excellent shooter. In an alternate universe, it might’ve gone on to be a household name when people rattle off their favorite shooter series.

History is worth remembering, even the bad parts

No one loves focusing on the bad times in our lives or in history, but those times still do need to be remembered. Keeping the context and the memories of what happened in the past alive is essential for navigating the uncertainty of the future.

These are just seven examples from the history of the industry that remind us as players to stay on our toes, and to keep an eye on what’s really going on behind a studio’s top-brass trying to minimize its mistakes and the damage caused to games and gamers.

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