7 Humiliating Backpedals from Publishers Over Terrible Ideas

Whoops! These companies immediately hit reverse after everyone got mad about their rubbish ideas...

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[breq-toren]

A "fun" sequel to this could be 7 (or 122) times publishers doubled down on their terrible ideas after the backlash.

[bradenjuengel]

It isn't quite the same because it didn't involve an actual backpedal, but my favorite recent "white text on a black background apology" was when the Gollum game's publisher got a chatbot to write their apology and it had the wrong name for the game in the text, calling it "The Lord of Ring: Gollum"

[xian]

The problem with Helldivers wasn't just a "we're on PC, we hate consoles" (although, thete's a lot of that on PC) but that PSN is not available worldwide. So a lot of people who had their account on those countries couldn't create a PSN account even if they wanted.

[parmesanzero]

I wouldn’t pay for an NFT, but I would pay for the original horse drawing with an autograph.

[chilomine]

"Augment your....preorder?"


That statement itself sounds criminal.

[Cyrus_T_Laserpunch]

The worst packpedals are the ones where the company doesn't give you the apology, but sells you the apology.

[apocrypha]

I love when they announce the terrible idea as if it's them doing us a massive favour and something they're super excited for.

"I can't wait to tell you guys about the freedom and convenience that you'll have from the new system where you pay every time you use the jump button. It'll just make everything so much better and clearer and simpler!"

[SteveDice]

Deus Ex Manking Divided actually had 2 embarrasing backpedals. After they got rid of the tiered preorders, turned out that the preorder items could only be used once, as in, in ONE save. If you used them, finished the game and started a new one, or you f'd up your character build and felt like restarting, they would be gone. Why would they do this, you ask? Simple, they put a store in-game where you could buy them again with real money. This, of course, lead to massive backlash and they eventually made it one per save, as it always should have been.

Edit: THEY DID NOT BACKPEDAL THIS.
I don't know why I thought they did. Don't delete your save.

[Chris_Sizemore]

The really egregious thing about Diablo 3's auction house was that Blizzard took a 25% cut from every transaction. So if you tried to dump some gear you couldn't use to buy stuff you needed, you effectively lost 25% of the sale value or add more real world cash to make up the difference.

[joshpvgvideogamesandanimer]

Man, I'm surprised Overwatch 2 wasn't put on this. First they tried restricting new heroes to the battlepass, now new heroes are free as soon as they come out. Just another wonderful Blizzard Idea

[DMBLaan]

Worth reminding people that while Helldivers 2 no longer "needs" a PSN login, it's still no longer available, or playable, in over 100 countries that don't have PSN. Even if they previously had access before hand.

[STRAKAZulu]

"PREPARE THE WHITE-ON-BLACK APOLOGY STATEMENT!"
🎺🎺🎺🎺🎺

[Michael_Lindell]

The developers of Destiny went back and forth like, well, a Bungie cord...

[KAPTAINmORGANnWoeva]

The most galling thing about entertainment companies' myriad apologies nowadays is that they always phrase them in annoying corporate positivespeak.

They'll never just outright say "we did something you didn't like, sorry" it's always "we're moving forward in an exciting new direction towards [the thing everyone expected at bare minimum to begin with]"

[mistertadakichi]

"We still wanna go forward and give you, the gamers, the most flexible, most powerful system we can, and game the way YOU wanna game, with the games you wanna game with... and the people you wanna play with."

Possibly the cringiest, most awkward, out-of-touch, "this sentence was developed via committee" game industry quote I've ever heard.

[teroknor]

I love the response to the Xbox One DRM. "We already have a console for offline, it's called the Xbox 360". It's shocking how little people have learned from that embarrassing fumble.

[VilkataG]

As I recall with the xbox drm fiasco, it wasn't player backlash that made them change, it was playstation's big reveal with the bold print bullet point "we don't care what you do with your games, no DRM." Then, like a week later, xbox backpeddled as they got their asses handed to them.

[MartynRice]

I've supported this channel for years. You've given us free content all this time but now you've got a fancy wall it's all broken promises. 115 of them all at once. 💔

[MightyCell]

Its kinda amazing after so many cases like these failing miserably, greedy CEOs still think they'll be the exception

[justinsinke]

Ah yes, "sunsetting", what a positive spin on "planned obsolescence".