10 Times The Games Industry Had No Idea WTF It Was Doing

For as much as we love the gaming industry, there's no denying that it has a penchant for bad ideas. Even back in the golden days of the NES it was clear that publishers and developers could be out of touch with what people wanted, resulting in half-baked ideas like the Power Glove and the Virtual Boy - which tend to only be remembered as memes today.

Unfortunately, it seems that even in 2017 the industry doesn't have much more of a grasp on what it's doing. The divide between companies and players is not only evident in the disastrous release of the Wii U, the 180 U-turns of the Xbox One or the arrogant pricing of the PS3, but also in various ideas that at the very core of what we're playing today.

Thankfully, these WTF decisions the industry likes to implement are usually quietly canned when they don't take off, but that moment of relief only comes after hearing studios insist they're on the right track with 'revolutionary' ideas.

Oftentimes the industry just doesn't know when to quit, resulting in all manner of doomed ideas that should have never made it off the whiteboard...

It's easy to forget how huge of a deal the Nintendo Wii was. Far eclipsing both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 in terms of sales and appeal, it didn't take long for Microsoft and Sony to attempt to get in on the peripheral-driven success of Nintendo's family-friendly console.

Unfortunately, both companies realised the appeal of motion controls way too late in the game, long after pretty much every family on the planet had already picked up a Wii to bust out at Christmas.

But not only was nobody who owned a Wii interested in Sony's Move motion controllers or Microsoft's full body-scanning Kinect, but this need to catch up to the Wii shifted the focus of Xbox and PlayStation away from the core players they appealed to.

Alienating the majority of your existing audience to attract one that was already happy with the machines they owned was a mistake, but it might not have been so disastrous if the peripherals were actually, you know, any good.

The Move revolution was dropped by Sony faster than the Vita, and while Microsoft gave the Kinect another go with the release of the Xbox One, they quietly killed support for it once again, just a year later.