10 Times Publishers Screwed Over A Video Game
Turns out EA puts money ahead of quality... who knew?!
Like it or not, video games exist to make money. You can tell that some games are passion projects and some even deserved to be recognised as pieces of art the way movies and TV shows are; generally though, these are the exceptions.
The publishers, as the moneymakers with little creative input, are usually seen as the bad guys. They push tight development schedules, they pressure developers into crunch time, they meddle in things they don’t understand and they force the microtransactions.
We’ve been so conditioned by microtransactions that those alone wouldn’t qualify a game as being screwed over. FIFA is full of them with Ultimate Team yet still flies off the shelves, while GTA is notorious for them but receives universal praise. Overwatch is even frequently lauded for sticking to cosmetic only lootboxes, such have we been Pavlov’s Dogged into accepting microtransactions in our games.
It’s not just the money grubbing that comes under fire here though. Either by insisting on in house uniformity, constant meddling, ripping out a game’s personality or setting deadlines which proved massively detrimental, these games have suffered more than most at the hands of publishers.
10. Haze
What a game Haze could’ve been. Developers Free Radical has just put out the Timesplitters trilogy, and Haze was set to be another groundbreaking game with an original premise and insightful features. Unfortunately, Ubisoft wanted the game to compete with Halo, so the game was shorn of any uniqueness and booted out limp and buggy to an undignified death.
Originally, it was set to tackle the horrors of warfare before any game had ever examined them. Spec Ops: The Line would not come out until four years later.
Haze had you playing as super soldiers who used Nectar to enhance their combat abilities. The Nectar caused hallucinations though, stopping the soldiers from seeing the true destruction and bloodshed they were causing. Hugely ambitious, it essentially needed levels to work on at least two planes at once.
Free Radical asked Ubisoft for more time to work on these distinctive features, but the response was worse than just a simple ‘no’. In addition to not delaying the game, Ubisoft pushed for more sandbox style features, without granting extra time to fix the game’s core issues.
Ubisoft eventually drafted in their own team, kicking Free Radical off their own game, and the end result was deeply disappointing.