10 Video Game Embarrassments You Won't Believe
These games won't ever live these embarrassments down.
The gaming industry is a massive commercial goliath and, honestly, a very strange beast at times.
We as gamers are generally shown only a carefully curated sliver of how the sausage is made, yet every so often a developer or publisher might screw up enough that it ends up making headlines.
No company is perfect of course, and corporations protecting their commercial interests aren't exactly surprising anyone, but sometimes they act with such craven abandon, and do such wantonly stupid things, that it's tough not to feel a pang of second-hand embarrassment for them.
And that's absolutely true of these 10 gaming industry fails from recent times, where companies and occasionally players themselves - but mostly companies, let's be clear - were caught red-handed behaving in less-than-ideal fashion.
From grossly hypocritical business practises to shockingly thin-skinned online behaviour, laughable lapses in QA, and an especially outrageous use of AI, these 10 video game embarrassments are a collective lesson in how developers, publishers, and gamers themselves shouldn't conduct themselves.
And looking on from the sidelines, it's tough not to wince at it all...
10. Rockstar Got Caught Pirating Their Own Games
There are understandably few things that video game publishers loathe more than piracy, and they'll take extreme measures if necessary to ensure their games can't be stolen - even releasing it with performance-crippling DRM like Denuvo.
Yet, Rockstar Games - who, unsurprisingly, are vehemently anti-piracy - were recently shown up in hilariously embarrassing fashion when the real reason for Manhunt's historically janky Steam release was revealed.
Manhunt has been a bug-filled mess for many years on Steam, with players having to use third-party mods to work it into a fully playable state.
But YouTuber Vadim M recently discovered that this is because Rockstar uploaded a cracked version of the game to Steam. In order to quickly circumvent the game's original DRM, Rockstar simply deferred to piracy group Razor 1911 and used their crack to beat the copy protection.
Inspecting the game's code reveals Razor 1911's signature inside it, as well as in two other Rockstar-published games - Max Payne 2 and Midnight Club II.
The glitches were actually caused by Rockstar attempting to cover their tracks and remove evidence of the crack from Manhunt's code, in turn accidentally activating another layer of copy protection which intentionally infests the game with bugs. Wild.