Video games were very difficult to blame in 2021, from the usual screenshot apologies over delays and busted launches to things that matter really like years of workplace abuse. No worries, everyone has done better. Take a long walk down the street and remember all the ways people tried to talk about their fuck ups in the game industry in 2021.
Wanna feel old? The big Cyberpunk 2077 apology was this year.
After the double-digit expansion strategy to close up 2020, CD Projekt Red kicked off 2021 with a video created by the co-founder Marcin Iwinski trying to break up and fix the problem. I’m deeply sad with this video and I have the public share up with it, I said. He laid out the studios plans for the future of the year to update and update Cyberpunk 2077, a move thought to be focused on getting ahead of a Bloomberg report that revealed some of the projects development ill and the strained working conditions. I guessed it. I never thought that it would happen like this. I assure you that we’ll try to regain your trust. The studio promised for a third time that it would not hurt all future projects. Since the apology, the release of the original post-launch plans have continued to fluctuate greatly. The first expansion and PS5 and Xbox X/S versions of this game will arrive sometime in 2022.
The highest cost of the Steam launch (at the time) was when the air was trought.
A sanction of Leviathan for Europe Universalis IV in April began. That the play director admitted that the studio was fucked up a few weeks ago in the forum post. Leviathan was one of the worst released we have ever had, wrote Johan Andersson, director of Paradox Tinto. As the studio manager and Game Director, this is my responsibility, and so I’ll apologize. This is almost my fault. Andersson blamed himself for not giving the team a break after the Emperor expansion, and said the studio is planning to bolster its plans to support the football unwelcome members. Recent reviews of Leviathan in Valves storefront are still really negative.
eFootball 2022 is a disaster.
Who would have guessed with a new name as inspiring as that? But no such rebranding would reveal that this year’s Pro Evo Soccer game was just one of the worst footballing games ever. Players looked like they were possessed by Silent Hill 2, and a long set of hilarious animations spread onto social media. Please take the mandatory photo of social media: apologize. We’re really sorry for the problem, and want to assure everyone that we’ll take every effort and improve the situation, Konami wrote. We’ll do our best to reach the best of users. We look forward to supporting eFootball 2022 with a strong support. That was in October. eFootball 2022 is still an eFiasco.
Epic Games Store is blaming Division 2 fraud.
Okay, so that apology didn’t technically come to mind in 2021, but this year has come to the light. The Multimillion dollar, legal dick-swinging competition Epic v. Apple gave an email to CEO Tim Sweeney in May 2019, the founders told Ubisoft that they would be happy to see the unique of a wealthy man groveling with a lot of people in front of another. Sweeney wrote that I was writing to apologize for the shortcomings of our Epic Games store and our Uplay integration. Within 48 hours, the fraud level for the division two approached 90 %. The scammers started to buy the game with stolen credit cards and then re-sell the Uplay accounts that Epic owned, but could get the money back. That is the fault in this situation entirely in Epics and all the minimum revenue guarantees are put forward for the good of us, wrote Sweeney. sorry for the problem. It wasn’t a surprise because the Division 2, in fact, existed 2 o’clock at the moment. At the end of this year’s World War I was one of the first high-profile games in the Epic Games Store. People became very confused about it. 2019 is very attractive.
The man that stands in play stopped playing career.
Another year, a new wife apologized for a videogame stream that described something vile. A free agent, Meyers Leonard was on call in Warzone in March when he slurmed an anti-semitic slur. That day, the FBI broke up with Leonard, and that day, an hour later, the NBA pro posted an email with his Twitter. I’m very sorry about using a racist slur from a live stream yesterday, wrote Leonard, who was the only teammate who stepped in his black Lives Matter protest during the 2020 NBA match if he had no idea it was racist. I’m not a proper representation of who I am, and I want to apologize to the Arisons, the members of my team, the coaches, the front office, and all the other members of the Miami Heat organizat, to my family, to our loyal fans and others who I hurt are in the Jewish community. The Miami Heat suspend Leonard and his sponsors dropped him. Later that month the team traded him to the Oklahoma City Thunder to serve as a salary filler. The Thunder released her a week later. He was spotted last weekend trying to improve before he inevitably brought back to the NBA.
World of Warships puts cuss in promotion code.
Prominent streamer Turry and other players rejected Wargaming for shady monetization schemes. A Wargaming employee jumped at an attack to take off the texas, to grab a promo code. That is truly World of Warships and its brutality. Wargaming instead of trying to get rid of the mascading word “Fullon” as a strange coincidence, defended it against a very foolish employee. I apologize to the players, to the viewers of Fridays stream, and, to the most of all, I apologize to @Turry, the studio wrote. We gave up your address without a notice and all knew what we were responsible.
Gaming CEO stans an abortion law.
Triwire Interactive CEO John Gibson enthusiastically expressed his support for an abortion ban in Texas on September 5th, which will be banned in the state. As a comedian, sometimes I don’t get politics, he wrote. Yet with many vocal peers on the other side of this problem, I felt it was important to build an accurate records account with a developer who has built in his passion for the game. He was turned over the next day to be dropped on his face. The company behind Killingfloor and Maneater wrote his comments disregarded the values of our whole team, our partners and so much of our society. Our leadership team at Tripwire is deeply sorry, and we’re unified in our commitment to rapid action and to foster a positive environment. Gibson later said that Tripwire treated him with only professionalism and class. He hasn’t tweeted since.
The biggest speeds scandal in Minecraft finally resolved its problems.
Mega YouTube star and Minecraft speedrunner Dream claimed that he didn’t cheat. He had a strong response over the past six months, leaving his reams of analysis and arguments back when he was first accused. Community mods declared his dangerously fast speedrun too unlikely to verify, partly because there are only one in a hundred billion people who actually lived in that way. Dream denied all of the allegations. He even hired experts to prove his innocence. The papers were written from an English language university. It was a long, unending thing that left detests. Until this year when he suddenly confessed to having a disqualifying mod that boosted drop rates at the moment of the speedrun in question. Ooops! I think the whole situation was very chaotic overall for everyone involved; I wish that I could go back and do something differently, because it was one of the worst weeks of my life and still impacts me every day. I sorry for anyone that I nailed or drew from.
Bethesda admitted that Starfield was an Xbox exclusive.
Microsoft had been dancing around exclusivity for months after the Bethesda acquisition, in hopes of not unnecessarily enraging fanboys still holding out hope that it spent almost $7 billion in other ways than making the star-studded library 100 percent its own. In the fall of 2021, Bethesdas Pete Hines finally ripped the bandaid off. If you have no idea how to keep the issue fixed for the PlayStation 5, you would need to tell them, yes. If you didn’t play anything, I could just say “You weren’t enough” but to tell GameSpot about the issues that have been raised by a PlayStation 5 player, as I did, the same as that one as a PlayStation, but if you were to continue playing on that console, Hines told GameSpot! I can do all that, sorry, don’t you? I can’t say it so much. I’m sure Hines isn’t sorry for blacklisting Kotaku for a decade. But after that we reported that Fallout 4 would be set in Boston. We are not shedding sleep on this though, and I’m sure Hines can’t meet his new multimillion dollar mansion. Since our emails are directly spammy, I’m going to say it here: Happy holidays to you, and everybody else.
FaZe ICO is falling.
As well as the NFT bonanza, everyone whos anybody has also been pushing junk cryptocurrencies, including members of the popular gaming influencer group FaZe Clan. Here is the short version. The blockchain tokens called Save the Kids were released in June. Lessons to the FaZe members, Kay, Jarvis, Nikan and Teeqo. The price of the token jumped up and then jumped. The fans were angry. An investigation by YouTuber SomeOrdinaryGamers pointed to a number of weird conincidences that made the whole thing look shady. FaZe Clan immediately condemned the cryptocurrency push, dropped Kay and suspended Jarvis, Nikan, and Teeqo. Kay said he was not worried, would not love the crypto space and was just really passionate about this world. He could not let all his fans down. Several weeks later he tried to take the OneOrdinaryGamers video off YouTube and told fans to never believe the lies being circulated online about him. A couple weeks later, Kay released a 30-minute video that he kept his innocence, promised to pay all of his fans back, and profusedly apologized for something he was apparently innocent of. I feel awful that it’s ever happened, so I’d like to do my best to help fix it, she said.
Tamara fantasia fedo una hombre fetro.
2021 was the year when some apologies got very, very weird. Perhaps not more so than the latest movie, in which a silver-haired child hid his face in a card announcing that she was delayed like she was creeping on Keira Knightley. We are still working hard on this project, but in order to make it an unforgettable adventure, we decided to change the release window to 2023, said Capcom, in its official announcement, about the scif-fi-games’ ongoing development. In the meantime, there’s another new artwork to share with you. Thanks for your patience.
Sol Cresta delayed, too.
Was the patient waiting for the release of neo-arcade shootem up Sol Cresta? I was unemployed. I mean, since it’s cool that its coming but also I didn’t understand it was even supposed to be out this month until Hideki Kamiya hosted a Very Sorry livestream devoted entirely to the fact that it wasn’t coming anymore. Staff read an apparent letter of an anti-corruption fan who was beaten to death for the postponement of Viewtiful Joe, and now again again by the postponement of Sol Cresta. Kamiya said that the game wasn’t finished yet because of a shift in scope. That was awful. Let’s do that again once a while.
FFXVI: Endwalker delayed two weeks of waiting for surgery.
Two weeks! That was all it took for Final Fantasy XIV: After a stream of revelations, Naoki Yoshida threw himself on, revealing that that long-anticipated expansion would be out in December instead of late November. As we also anticipate heavy amounts of congestion across all games Worlds, I felt that, even in this regard, it wouldn’t be reasonable to end the expansion, but the solitary level of stability, he said. I’m real sorry. Since it’s the most profitable Final Fantasy ever, Yoshida has apologized a lot this year, possibly more than any other single player, but has now successfully managed that great game in the past. After that it won the best ongoing award at this years Game Awards. Yoshida was very sorry for overloaded servers earlier this year. At the time, today after Square Enix announced its imminent stop selling the game due to its too popular brand.
Rockstar bungles GTA classics.
The Grand Theft Auto Trilogy remasters didn’t be delayed, but certainly should’ve been. After leaving the original versions, the publisher Take-Two placed the original GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas, inside the world, where they was immediately pilloried by critics and fans for weird bugs, and lack of open world fog, and of course the eye-stabbing rain. It was quite bad that a week later Rockstar apologized for the busted remasters, gave up the original versions and gave them for free to anyone who had purchased the Trilogy. We sincerely apologize to everybody who encountered problems in this sport. The Grand Theft Auto-series and the games that make up this iconic trilogy are all the same special to us as it is about fans everywhere, wrote Rockstar. The updated version of these classic games hasn’t begun in a state that meets our standards of quality or standards at once, but in a state that’s the kind of standards you want them to expect.
Bungie
The Destiny 2-maker, known for its progressive politics, was a beacon for improved work in bigger game studios. However, a recent report by IGN revealed a full story on problems from years to the present, all the above, covering the issues of the infamous lobby lobby and threatening their colleagues. Ten developers at that studio have credited their voices to social media, and Bungie CEO is a remarkable, but also defensive, in a blog post that addressed the article. I want to apologize to anyone who has ever experienced a good work environment, writes Parsons. I am not here to criticize and challenge what is happening today to people who have graced our studio with their time and talents. We were wronged. I apologize personally and in behalf of everyone at Bungie who, I know, feels deep empathy and grief with these accounts.
Activision Blizzard
Following the California lawsuit alleging widespread sexual discrimiatnion and harssment, a second by the Federal regulators, which is currently headed to settlement, and numerous reports highlighting longstanding issues and past misconduct, no gaming company has much more to say no more than publishing the goliath Activision Blizzard. Let’s recap it very quickly how its denials morphed into apologies in the last six months:
Firstly, the DFEH case has a claim that the unaccountable State bureaucrats mislead not the irresponsible behavior of unaccountable reprimanded bureaucrats. The Chief Compliance Officer Fran Townsend called the lawsuit “an error” in a follow-up email. As promised, the CEO, Bobby Kotick, said he was sorry we didn’t get enough empathy and understanding from the employees who staged a departure. The Wall Street Journal reported that Townsend later apologized for her first email from Activision employees at a womens group meeting. Months later, Kotick announced his apology for new experiences. People were deeply upset, and I’m truly sorry, wrote he. It turned out that Townsends original email was actually drafted by Kotick. [He] is responsible for the incident, and regrets it, a spokesperson said. I wouldn’t blame that mistake for Mr. Townsend.
And that is not the official line of a company. Others at Blizzard, past and present, on their own apology tour.
We didn’t work, and I’m sorry, said Chris Metzen, co-creator of Diablo. Former Blizzard president J. Allen Brack told staff that allegations against the company were very troubling, but reassured them that feminist icon Gloria Steinem was a revered saint growing up. I apologize for those as well as for this, says Greg Street of a BlizzCon 2010 panel where female fan was dismissed and misled for less sexualized characters. To the Blizzard women who experienced these things, I’m extremely sorry that I failed you, wrote Michael Morhaime, former founder and CEO of Blizzard. I realize these are not words, but I wanted to recognize all of the women that had terrible experiences. I hear you. Believe me, I’m really sorry I let you down. According to The Wall Street Journal, Morhaime praised Ed Kilgore, then-membremental of the corporation in a company email in 2018.
In addition, current and former leaders in many Activision studios, where there were reportedly no sexual misconduct reported or covered up, still work to make their apologies.
Kotaku
We didn’t delay a competition or face a workplace abuse dispute, but Kotaku apologized this year for that inconvenience. Shortly after launch of Metroid Dread, we reported that it was being emulated in 4K on PC. Some people believed that the original version of the story encouraged piracy of Nintendos latest Switch game. We regret the interpretation and apologize, since the original article failed to meet our editorial requirements, and after the article went viral, we wrote an apology, assuming that Kotaku isn’t good at telling the story. We hope that Nintendo reasserting it doesn’t promote greylisting websites for doing journalism. Update: 12.12.21, 14:05 p.m. ET: Adds a little information to Bungie.
