Game of the Year 2023 – Biggest Disappointment
2023 has been another great year for games as a whole with some exceptional experiences that have been a pure joy to play, but as always there’s been some jarring disappointments that hit hard, and we’ve seen the impact of slowing economies around the world on executives making business decisions.
When a game becomes so widely panned and underperforms so much that a company completely gives up on actually making games, you know something’s gone very badly wrong. On paper, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum could have been a good game, with Daedalic Entertainment finding a little niche within the wider Middle-earth tale that they could try to flesh out and fill in.
Disappointingly, the game came up short on pretty much every level. From a narrative perspective, it was too shallow in how it represented the push and pull of the competing Gollum and Smeagol personalities, and featured utterly average stealth action and mediocre graphics. But as it launched, it also brought game-breaking bugs that made it impossible to complete.
This was simply a crushing game release that, after issuing a public apology, saw Daedalic’s internal development division shut down, focussing its efforts toward game publishing as a subsidiary of parent company Nacon.
After half a decade of seemingly unending growth and acquisitions, Embracer Group has made an about-turn in 2023, with the behemoth gaming conglomerate shutting down studios, laying off developers and looking to sell on subsidiaries that it had only just bought in the last couple of years.
All of this is thanks to the company’s executives banking on a $2 billion funding deal that fell apart at the last moment, reportedly with the Saudi PIF’s Savvy Gaming Group. This shook the company’s plans to
Read more on thesixthaxis.com
