MMNTech GOTY Awards 2024: Biggest Disappointments

Happy holiday season you yellow, no good keisters. It’s time again for the MMNTech GOTY awards, where we celebrate the best, and most mediocre, games of 2024.

Compiling the list of biggest disappointments was actually quite a challenge this year. Not because there were no terrible games. Rather gamers have become conditioned now to just expect AAA slop. Hard to be disappointed if you were never appointed in the first place. That’s not to say there weren’t some really standout shockers though. The kind of cat poo that you wouldn’t even want under your worst enemy’s Christmas tree. Better dig into dad’s “special” eggnog, and pour yourself a tall glass for this one.

Dishonourable Mention

Helldivers 2 (Sony/Arrowhead)

You’re quickly going to find out our “awards” this year have a bit of a running theme. Helldivers 2, the sequel to the somewhat obscure PS Vita shooter, turned out to be a surprise hit for PlayStation. 12 million players suited up to fight for the glory of Super Earth. That is until Sony took the Death Star to it.

The game had initially launched with a PSN requirement for PC players. However, the developers, Arrowhead, quickly made it optional to ease login issues on launch. Word of mouth got out that it was a damn good online shooter, which caused player numbers to explode. Sony in their infinite wisdom then demanded the mandatory PSN requirement be returned.

Now, PC gamers hate having to sign in to yet another launcher or online service. Especially given PSN’s reputation for having all the security of a nice piece of Emmentaler. Making matters worse, the game had proven popular in many countries where PSN is not available. Not just your usual suspects like Russia or Iran either. We’re talking places like most of the Caribbean, the Baltic States, The Philippines, Andorra, Lichtenstein, Serbia, and most of Africa. Tough nut for Divers in the notoriously rogue state of Estonia.

The game was massively review bombed on Steam. Even PS5 players joined arms with their Master Race brothers in protest. Sony, however, stood their ground and is now starting to make PSN mandatory for all new PlayStation titles released on PC. Taking what was an easy GOTY contender to our dishonourable mentions list.

The “Pro Boner” award goes to…

The PlayStation 5 Pro (Sony)

Sony appears on our list for the second year in a row for yet another bone headed bit of hardware.

Last year we covered the Portal, a PlayStation handheld that wasn’t actually a handheld. Just a glorified, and expensive, wireless monitor with a controller glued to the side. For 2024, Sony hoped to lower the bar once again with a follow up to the PS5. Rumours of a mid-gen “Pro” refresh had been swirling around for some time before it officially got announced in September. And the response from gamers was a collective shrug.

The system promised an improved RDNA3-based APU with 28% faster memory and a 45% uplift in game performance over the base console. It would also include “AI” driven upscaling. Then official specs came out closer to launch. It would include an additional 2GB of DDR5 memory, 2TB of internal storage, the same CPU, and an upgraded GPU capable of up to 16.7 TFLOPS. This puts it roughly in line with the RX 7600 XT, a $329 mid-range desktop graphics card.

This isn’t terribly surprising, given that the PS4 Pro featured an underclocked, off-the-shelf RX 480. Though that console still managed to offer more than double the uplift over the base model, while retaining the same launch price. The PS5 Pro though would be a little more expensive.

While the base digital-only PS5 sells for $399, the PS5 Pro would retail for a butt puckering (and PS3-esque) $699. Which you’ll notice is quite a bit more than 45%. It also lacks a disc drive, meaning if you already have the disc-based PS5, which most people do, you’d be unable to play your physical library. That is unless you fork out an extra $80 for the add-on drive. Which at the time of writing is sold out everywhere. If you want to sit it vertically, that’s an additional $30 for the stand. In their infinite greed, Sony also chose to utterly hose its overseas fans, with the Pro going for €799.99 and £699.99 in the European and UK markets. That roughly equates to $882 and $916 USD respectively. Ouch.

Gamers questioned the purpose of this “Pro” console when PlayStation has few exclusive games that would take advantage of it. Benchmarks also showed barely any improvements to frame rates, with some games actually performing worse on the upgraded console. Others noted the marginal difference in visual fidelity between the base and pro models. Ray tracing is certainly a lot better, which helps the handful of games that actually utilize it. However it seems we’ve hit a wall of diminishing returns for what we can do with graphics. And if there’s no games, graphics horsepower means diddly squat.

The “Oh the Humanity” award goes too…

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 (Microsoft/Asobo Studio)

Back in the early 2000s, your pal MMNTech had a bit of an obsession with aviation. I wanted to be a pilot. However being a broke high school student, I couldn’t exactly afford IRL lessons. So instead I sunk hundreds of hours into Microsoft Flight Simulator. Basically all my PC experience comes from trying to get FS2002 running smoothly on a Duron 950 and a passively cooled GeForce 2 MX400.

Following the release of FS:X in 2006, Microsoft decided to go all in on consoles, closed the studio, and put the franchise on ice. Most sim enthusiasts figured that was it, and moved on to X-Plane, or kept playing the older versions. That is until Microsoft rebooted it out of the blue in 2020. The new version brought a lot of features fans had wanted, such as real satellite terrain powered by Bing Maps, online multiplayer, better physics, better weather models, modern graphics, and all the juicy performance enhancements brought about by newer hardware. It was even the first version to release on console. All great news, except there were a few problems.

FS2020 suffered from notoriously long load times. So did its predecessors, but not to this degree. It was basically impossible to play on a hard drive. Believe me, I tried. It also always seemed to want a massive update every time you booted it up, which would always take ages to download even on my decently fast connection. Furthermore, it was also the first version of Flight Sim to be “always-online”. A lot of assets such as the Bing Maps terrain were streamed from remote servers. FS2020 was already a massive install in and off itself, so Microsoft claimed this was to save space. When you did finally get in game though, it was a solid experience.

Fast forward to this year with the release of FS2024. Problems with the earlier game weren’t fixed, but have somehow seemed to get worse.

Microsoft, which I remind you is one one of the largest data companies in the world, only expected 200,000 people to boot up the game at launch. Well, apparently it was more than that. It’s hard to say how many. Steam only showed a peak player count of 24,000, but it is on Game Pass as well. There was, allegedly, such a large influx of players that it crashed the servers and preventing anyone from logging in. So much for flying the friendly skies. Everyone was stuck sleeping in the terminal. Probably on those uncomfortable benches, with nothing to eat but overpriced Cake Boss cake sold out of a vending machine.

Gamers also reported numerous other issues ranging from agonizingly slow load times, assets failing to populate, and cache data cluttering up their drives. FS2024 quickly fell to the bottom of Steam reviews, becoming the second lowest rated AAA title on the platform within a matter of hours. Adding insult to injury, Microsoft charges up to $200 UDS for the “Aviator Edition”, which simply adds some extra plane models. Imagine slapping down two hundred bones for a game that’s not even finished. That’s almost as bad as those who paid extra to get early access to Star Wars: Outlaws.

Given that they already had a semi-cromulent game to build on, it’s a mystery how they managed to screw this one up. Jet fuel might not melt steel beams, but it sure turned this franchise into a goopy puddle. And yes, I did just make a 9/11 joke. I regret nothing!

The “Gone in a Fortnite” award goes to…

Concord (Sony/Firewalk)

A game like Concord would normally fall under the Dishonourable Mentions category. It’s another ugly, cringe, woke game, with mediocre mechanics, that nobody asked for, in a genre that hit its peak half a decade ago. Heck, even in the woke department it still gets completely eclipsed by our #1 pick this year. Needless to say, it was always destined to be a footnote in the annals of video game history. Well, except for one itty bitty little fact. It’s almost certainly the biggest commercial failure the industry has ever seen, by a country mile. This is one of those things where the deeper you dig, the more bonkers it get. So much raw incompetence combined to Thanos snap this game out of existence, all within half the lifespan of a house fly.

Concord only managed to pull an utterly abysmal peak of 697 players on Steam at launch, and things just went downhill from there. It was so bad that people were having trouble finding enough players online to fill 5v5 matches. The situation on PS5 wasn’t much better. When all was said and done, 25,000 copies were sold across both platforms. Few of which are still out in the wild. Why? Sony made the unprecedented move to recall the game, and issued full refunds to anyone who bought it. Concord was only on the market for two whole weeks before they pulled the plug.

Yet it’s clear Sony, or rather SIE’s current CEO Hermen Hulst, though the game was going to be their next hot ticket IP. They even made a custom controller for it, and had loads of merch ready to go. However the whole project was doomed from the start.

Concord was reportedly in development for 8-years. Which is already an absurd amount of time for any game. Then we found out just how much it cost. Not $250 million, not $300 million, but an absolutely eye watering $400 million. Enough to buy a brand new jumbo jet with money left over for gas. Even the most jaded of gamers were shocked at the amount of dough burned on this game. With its $40 retail price, Concord would’ve had to sell between 10 and 17 million copies just to break even. In other words, it would have to pull in numbers similar to Uncharted 4 before it could even think of turning a profit. Even if the game was good, that was optimistic. For the record, the current best selling PS5 title, Spider-Man 2, has only sold 11 million copies.

Then there’s the inside baseball. Like how Firewalk considered beta feedback to be “noise”. Or how one dev labelled critics “talentless freaks”. Or how another dev forced everyone in the office to call her “The Professor” under penalty of HR reprimand. Seriously, she’s even listed as “The Professor” in the game’s credit roll despite never having taught at a university. If it seems like the lunatics were running the asylum, well, they were. I’m just surprised nobody tried to claim they were Napoleon.

Pretty much everything about this game was as unappealing as you could get. Good, attractive, characters are the backbone of any hero shooter. Just look at all the Rule 34 Overwatch spawned. Yet Concord’s were beyond hideous. Like did you know IT-Z, the green thing in the crop top, is supposed to be a cat girl? Because I sure as heck didn’t. Bad art design aside, the rest of it was marred by uninspired gameplay, equally dull maps, and robots with pronouns.

Sony had planned at one point to make it free-to-play following its initial commercial failure, but the damage had already been done. So the decision was made in late October to scrap Concord, and Firewalk Studios, for good. Nothing of value was lost.

Which brings us to why it’s on the list. If Concord only sold at best 25,000 copies, that means at best it pulled in somewhere between $700,000 and $1 million, depending on the ratio of PSN to other retailer purchases. Thus recouping only 0.25% of its budget. Well, before the refunds. Even ET, the notoriously awful game often cited as the cause of the 1983 crash, still managed to make most of its budget back. In fact ET sold more copies than Concord. I can’t think of any other game that’s lost that much money. It’s truly a titanic failure. A black mark on Hermen Hulst’s record, and one which will surely be studied in business courses for years to come.

And the “winner” of the most disappointing game of 2024 is…

Dragon Age: The Veilguard (EA/BioWare)

BioWare doesn’t exactly have a great batting average right now. After “winning” our very first Biggest Disappointment award in 2017, the once legendary developer of games like Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Knights, and KotOR hasn’t exactly been dinging homers. Most of the original staff have left, leaving a bunch of children in their wake. If racist tirades and dancing on TotalBiscuit’s (RIP) grave weren’t enough to get your blood boiling, they’ve done everything they can to nuke the studio’s legacy.

Take Dragon Age, the once highly regarded dark fantasy series. Those games rank as some of the best WRPGs ever made. Yet after Inquisition, EA put the franchise on ice. After a decade of waiting, fans were eagerly anticipating their next trip to Thedas, right? Right? Well, nope. Gamers have now gotten used to setting the bar low for AAA. Especially from multiple “worst company in America” award winner Electronic Arts. So enthusiasm was tepid to say the least.

The initial unveiling of Dragon Age: The Veilguard was straight up bizarre though. First the game had switched genres from a hard RPG to a third-person action game with some RPG elements. Which is fine. A lot of franchises have successfully changed genres. However rather than highlight gameplay, BioWare and games journalists instead focused on the game’s… character creator? Everything quickly started to fall apart from there.

It was already evident that Veilguard was going to be very woke. For one, the creator didn’t allow you to give female (sorry, Body Type B) characters anything bigger than an A-cup, with butts so small that Sir Mix-A-Lot would spit out his 40 in disgust. Regardless of which you selected, all options were pretty androgynous. Journalists were also weirdly fixated on the the ability to give your character mastectomy scars. Remember this is a game set in a medieval fantasy world. Yeah, this is pretty par for the course from Western entertainment now, and things didn’t get any better from there.

Less than an hour into the game, one of the main characters boldly declares, out of the blue, that they’re non-binary, and proceeds to get into a fight with another over it. Veilguard also features lesbian romances, lectures about proper pronoun use, and even has a quest where your character can become transgender. It was pretty clear that writers had turned the once highly decorated franchise into somebody’s bad Tumblr fetish fanfiction. A delightfully propagandistic romp across the medieval wastes with your uncanny valley friends, crossing swords so to speak, while completely ignoring a lot of Dragon Age’s established lore. As an aside, I find a lot of these woke games all share a very similar art style. It’s like cottagecore mixed with an unhealthy amount of purple. Everything has this soft, cozy, safe, plasticky, rounded corners look to it, where nothing is too strong, too sexualized, nor too offensive. At least by Californian sensibilities.

For their part gamers were quick to declare themselves non-buy-nary. Veilguard had an okay start, hitting a peak of 89,418 players on Steam, before quickly dropping off to less than a third of that. Refund rates were also reported to be abnormally high. I’m writing this three weeks post-launch, and the game had still failed to crack one million copies. Instead it’s been quickly eclipsed by STALKER 2, and last year’s hit RPG Baldur’s Gate 3. I guess people would rather have bear sex than freaky gay horned demon sex. Well, at least if Blitzo isn’t involved.

What is there really left to say about Veilguard? It’s not the wokest game of the year. That goes to Dustborn. It’s not even the biggest commercial failure. That goes to Concord. It’s just a thoroughly lacklustre Western AAA title, and yet another microcosm of everything wrong with the industry. After years of mediocre games stuffed with mediocre gameplay, and packed with far-left political pandering, gamers are finally fed up. 2024 has been an absolute bloodbath for the industry as a result.

Even journalists have begun walking back on their initial praise of Veilguard, calling it too woke for its own good. It was notoriously snubbed by The Game Awards, aka that other show that competes with the MMNTech GOTYs, when I thought for damn sure it would sweep. I guess Geoff Keighley, even in his Mountain Dew and Doritos addled state, still has enough sense not to Fat Man his credibility. Though BioWare has already nuked theirs. They’re no longer the studio that once made the games you love. Those people are long gone. Most gamers at this point want to see the entire studio gone too.