The all time 5 worst game launches? Honestly, that’s a list that has to be tough to narrow down to just 5. Still, 1Up has managed to highlight the worst offenders. One managed to recover quite nicely and become one of the highest rated games of all time, but the delivery and verification process at release was insanely bad.
2. Steam/Half-Life 2
Yes, yes, we all love Steam now. It’s the model of digital distribution and community management in PC gaming right now, utterly shaming Microsoft’s embarrassingly inept Games for Windows Live initiative. But back in the day, we were even harsher on Valve than we now are on Microsoft — because the official launch of Steam on November 16, 2004, which coincided with the launch of Half-Life 2, was an utter nightmare.
Wall-of-text warning on the original article, though. Seems the web-layout folks might want to educate the writers on the importance of more paragraphs and other visual breaks.
[tags]1Up, Half-Life, Worst game launches, Gaming[/tags]