Taking an Arrow to the Knee: 2011 in Review

2011 was a year of disappointments in the gaming world. Sure, the industry as a whole made a lot of money and some games broke sales records, as happens every year. But financial success does not equate to quality or contentment. Modern Warfare 3 may have made Activision even more wealth than it already had, but that wealth does not compensate for losing the Hero franchise of games for the company. While the employees of MW3’s design studios are cashing their fat bonus checks, thanks to Activision’s mismanagement the employees of the Hero studios are cashing their unemployment checks. The point is this: the bad things that happened in the industry this year far outweigh the good things.

Let’s use Duke Nukem Forever as a case in point. Here is a game that no one thought would ever see the light. While most games are in development for two or three years, this game was in development for fourteen years. It was first announced in 1997 and when it didn’t appear within a reasonable time frame, most gamers wrote it off as canceled and forgot about it. When Gearbox Software announced that the game was finally being released this year and actually had a working demo to back up their claims, the anticipation was therefore extraordinary. And then the game was released and the end product was . . . less than anticipated, to put it kindly. To be fair, the game was designed last century, and there is fun to be had in playing it, but it cannot stand up to contemporary games, including those made by Gearbox itself. If Duke Nukem Forever had come out in 1997, it would have been an excellent game. As it is, the game turned out to be a bigger disappointment than if it had never come out at all.

But okay, Duke Nukem Forever is a single game and not every game can be a winner. That is in the nature of creative work. For as lackluster as the game is, that poor level of quality is the product of creative missteps, not corporate mismanagement (although its publishing history is a product of such mismanagement). The quality of the game is not an indicator of the industry as a whole, although the disappointment surrounding the game is indicative of the year’s events. To get a sense of the industry as a whole, let’s go back to the example of Activision. The management—and mismanagement—over at Activision found expression in two notable occurrences this year: the killing of the Hero games (Guitar Hero, Band Hero, DJ Hero) and the company’s ugly feud with EA.

Let’s begin with the Hero games. Activision announced that they were killing the games because the music game genre wasn’t selling well anymore and there wasn’t enough demand for those games. It’s a small wonder why there was no demand for those games: Activision glutted the market with them, releasing multiple iterations of the Hero games of successively poor quality. In fact, the company released fourteen games in the Guitar Hero line alone in only five years, each one worse than the last. The problem Activision ran into is one of basic economics: too much supply of poor quality for too little demand. In order to maximize its profits, the company produced shovelware that caused gamers to turn away in disgust.

Speaking of disgust, Activision’s feud with EA took a particularly distasteful turn this year. Leading up to the release of Modern Warfare 3—part of the company’s Call of Duty franchise which has itself received annual iterations—Activision began disparaging EA’s similar game Battlefield 3 in a very public manner, going as far as to seize a website owned by a Battlefield fan that dared to mock Modern Warfare. For its part, EA descended into the muck as well in order to respond to Activision’s attacks. The whole situation was akin to the immature trash talking found in online gaming except writ large for the whole world to see. It was a prime example of why the gaming industry is perceived as an illegitimate pastime for emotionally stunted shut-ins.

These situations make it clear that Activision puts profits before quality or even common decency. Of course, such corporate greed should come as no surprise considering the current state of the U.S.’ economy. After all, it is just such corporate greed that got us into this mess. It is also just such corporate greed that resulted in the industry crash of 1983 and I fear that if this greed is not checked the industry will experience another such crash.

Of course, when reviewing gaming news stories from this year it is impossible to overlook the problems faced by Nintendo and Sony. I’ve discussed Nintendo’s travails in depth elsewhere in this blog, so I will not repeat that here. I will, however, mention their latest mishap regarding Shigeru Miyamoto’s retirement. After he stated in an interview with Wired that he plans to retire from his executive position so as to go back to a more hands-on role in designing games—which is exactly what he should do—Nintendo quickly forced a retraction of that comment, saying that Miyamoto was misinterpreted. Whether he was misinterpreted or not—I think not—Nintendo’s response just reinforced the impression that the company’s executives don’t know what they’re doing.

But the biggest news story in the industry this year was by far the Playstation Network outage in the spring. When hackers stole passwords and, possibly, credit card data from the PSN, Sony was forced to shut down the service so they could rebuild it. Although this event in itself should not have been a big deal, the way Sony bungled the handling of it made it much worse. Not only did they shut down the service for over a month, which deprived its customers of the functionality they were promised when they bought their systems and cost publishers large amounts of money in lost revenue, the company failed to disclose the problem in a timely manner. The resulting impression was of a company that was clueless and irresponsible at best and outright devious at worst. Sony’s initial handling of the situation prompted lawsuits and even a Congressional investigation and rightly so. Although I believe the company redeemed itself in the end by formally apologizing for the fiasco and offering free games and upgrades to its customers, the damage had been done. The company lost a lot of money and, worse, credibility.

So is there a lesson in all of these disappointments? I truly do not know. The game industry is still relatively young and youth is prone to mistakes and indiscretions. However, the industry has been around long enough that such issues should have been outgrown by now. So if there is a lesson for the industry, I think it is this: act your age. If you want to be taken seriously and be viewed as a legitimate business that produces a product of legitimate social value, then stop acting like a drunken frat boy.