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1. Konami. Just... Konami

You'd be hard pressed to recall a controversy in the video game industry bigger than the one that hit publisher Konami last year, with almost every month of 2015 springing up a brand new problem for the fallen-from-grace game company. Once a pillar of Japanese game development (bringing us such classic franchises as Metal Gear Solid, Castlevania, Silent Hill, Contra and Frogger ), it's pretty difficult to comprehend how they've managed to crash so hard.



Where do we even begin with this one? The controversy began in March, with developer Hideo Kojima's name mysteriously being removed from all marketing material relating to the upcoming game Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. With Kojima being such a strong selling point for the franchise he built and very little said on the matter by Konami (in fact, they attempted to play it off as simply a re-brand), this led to speculation that he may be departing the company after decades of employment.





Next, in April, Konami decided to remove P.T. - the 'playable teaser' of Hideo Kojima's upcoming Silent Hills game - from the PlayStation Store. Worse yet, not only had the game been delisted from the store, but anyone attempting to re-download it after removing it from their PlayStation 4 would be unable to do so - effectively eradicating P.T from history.

Understandably, this upset gamers, as the horror title was very well received as a standalone piece of work - and blocking any game from being preserved is not exactly a widely appreciated practice in the game community.



Later, Silent Hills collaborator Guillermo del Toro revealed that the title had been cancelled, with Konami removing itself from the New York Stock Exchange the very same day that they officially announced its cancellation - all the while remaining incredibly vague as to why, as well as continuing to stay silent on the Kojima situation.



It only spiralled down from there; additions to the furore included Konami explaining that they were focusing on a 'mobile first' future, a report claiming mistreatment of employees in their Japanese headquarters, a rather unfortunate anti-Konami hashtag on Twitter trending, a heavy focus on creating pachinko machines (a type of arcade gambling machine popular in Japan) instead of video games, barring Kojima from accepting an award for his own game, and a perceived general disregard for the company's own beloved franchises and history.



In short, it sucks to be Konami right now, and it's a shame to see the company having completely lost their way.

2. Batman: Arkham Knight's PC debacle





After a fantastic first two games with Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City (as well as a lackluster prequel, Batman: Arkham Origins, developed by another studio), expectations were high with Rocksteady Studios' third and final game in the series, Batman: Arkham Knight. Although generally received well at first with its home console release, it was when its PC port arrived that controversy struck.



Regarded as 'the biggest AAA screw-up of 2015' by many, Arkham Knight suffered from one of the worst video game PR debacles in recent memory when its PC port arrived back in June.

Almost immediately, reports flooded in that the game was effectively an unplayable mess for the majority of players, with graphical glitches, crashes and atrocious frame rate drops reported en-masse.

The PC port was so horrific that, in an unprecedented move for an AAA title, its publisher Warner Bros. decided to pull the game from sale on PC digital platforms, promising that the game's plethora of issues would be fixed imminently and the game re-released.

This was considered an honourable move coming from such a large publisher - that is, of course, until reports surfaced suggesting that Warner Bros. had been aware of the poor state of the game even before release but decided to push it out anyway.



Although fans originally expected for the game to return within a matter of weeks, it only resurfaced four months later, with many users reporting very similar issues as before and its developers admitting that the game was virtually 'unfixable'.

Warner Bros. did their best to rectify the situation by doling out a few free games and offering full refunds to anyone that purchased the game, but the damage was already done - Rocksteady's last Batman game had already been overshadowed by one of the year's biggest controversies.

3. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5





When Activision announced that a new Tony Hawk's Pro Skater game was in development, fans rejoiced. A new Tony Hawk game had not released for 8 years, and the Pro Skater name had not been used for 13 years.



However, trouble with the game was apparent almost from the start - the game experienced an art style overhaul just two months before its release date (eventually leading to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game being delayed by a month) and initial screenshots and trailers of the game were not positively received.



When the game finally launched, what gamers found was a game with numerous technical issues, overly simplistic missions and extremely bland gameplay. For a franchise with such a respected history - Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 remains to be one of the highest rated games of all time on Metacritic - it's a shame to see its good name used for a game that was made so poorly.

4. Steam's Christmas Day meltdown





Christmas Day celebrations were cut short for PC gamers when a serious security issue hit the PC digital gaming platform Steam. For roughly two hours, many players around the world were faced with a page containing a random user's information when attempting to view a Steam store page.



Store page requests containing sensitive information (such as a user's address, purchase history, email address and the last two digits of their credit card number) were leaked for roughly 34,000 users, with fears on the day that entire accounts and payment options could be at risk. Though this later proved to be untrue as the page was simply cached information, this led to a meltdown on social media, with Valve eventually taking the entire Steam Store offline to correct the problem.



Though certainly not as great a security risk as it initially seemed, this proved to be a disastrous situation for Steam (especially as their highly successful Steam Winter Sale was currently underway), and they received a hefty fan and press backlash after only officially addressing the issue five days later.

5. Payday 2 and micro-transactions





You wouldn't expect a two-year-old game to be one of the most controversial games of 2015, but somehow developer Overkill Software managed to do just that with Payday 2.



A co-operative first-person shooter game, Payday 2 still had a thriving online community even two years after its release in 2013. In an attempt to boost the game's profits and exploit this robust community of players, Overkill announced the addition of in-game safes that would contain weapon skins, some of which could improve a weapon's statistics. However, in order to open these safes, drills would have to be purchased with real world currency.



This effectively unbalanced the game, meaning that those willing to commit to Payday 2's new micro-transactions would potentially possess better weaponry than those that did not.

Given that players had purchased the game before this game-changing system was introduced, the Payday 2 community (and the gaming press) erupted - worsened yet by Overkill's silence on the subject and introduction of new downloadable content that gave players yet further boosts, which had previously been promised to be simply cosmetic.



The Payday 2's Steam community moderators reacted with some resigning their posts and others demanding that the game's producer grant them a better explanation of the mistreatment of the community. Many of these issues remain within the game - effectively altering a two-year-old game to incorporate several 'pay-to-win' mechanics.

6. Keiji Inafune's Kickstarter campaigns





In what is evidence of nothing being sacred in video games, controversy struck upon Keiji Inafune (creator of Mega Man) last year for what was a pretty catastrophic approach to two separate Kickstarter campaigns with his company Comcept.



After finding success on crowdfunding platform Kickstarter with a Mega Man spiritual successor Mighty No. 9 in 2013 (which became the third most-funded video game ever at the time), Keiji Inafune decided to crowdfund a spiritual successor to his Mega Man Legends series with a project titled Red Ash.



Unfortunately, the project didn't kick off too well (perhaps because pledging money towards another project before their first project is complete seems a bit off) and it looked as if Red Ash wouldn't reach its goal - meaning the team wouldn't receive any funding whatsoever.

However, with four days remaining for the project, Comcept announced that they'd found an outside investor for the game and that any Kickstarter funds already raised would simply go towards stretch goals - the specifics of which they were unwilling to announce.

On top of Red Ash and the as-of-yet incomplete Mighty No. 9 (which repeatedly suffered from delays amid quality concerns, with even the game's 'apology demo' hilariously being delayed), Comcept decided to set up yet another Kickstarter campaign, this time for an animation based on Red Ash.

Mighty No. 9 had also previously garnered additional funds through a secondary Kickstarter for 'bonus content'. With four messy Kickstarters under their belt, Comcept have yet to actually release any of their crowdfunded projects.

7. Call of Duty's fake terrorism alert





It's very easy to create controversy via social media blunders, which is just what happened back in September when Call of Duty's official Twitter page decided to initiate a very ill-conceived marketing campaign.

In a series of tweets from @CallofDuty - which currently has 2.9million followers - a fictional event pertaining to upcoming game Call of Duty: Black Ops III's plot was explained in a series of eighteen tweets spanning over four hours.

The Twitter account's header image and icon were altered to emulate that of a typical 'breaking news' account (with the header image reading 'Current events aggregate - where we bring you real news') and the campaign began with the tweet 'BREAKING NEWS: Unconfirmed reports are coming in of an explosion on the North bank of the Singapore Marina.'

Unfortunately, these tweets describing fictional reports of a terrorist attack occurring in Singapore failed to appropriately display that this was simply a marketing campaign, with many Twitter users expressing confusion and disgust. After remaining silent on the controversy for more than two weeks, Black Ops 3's single-player director eventually apologised on behalf of the marketing department in an interview with IGN.

8. Roosterteeth's Fallout 4 debacle



Bethesda's Fallout 4 was one of 2015's most anticipated video games - and for good reason, as its predecessor Fallout 3 remains to be one of the finest open-world game experiences.

The game largely saw very positive reviews; however, we (thankfully) do not all have the same opinions, and so when Giant Bomb's Jeff Gerstmann gave the game 3-out-of-5 stars, the popular video game entertainment company Rooster Teeth didn't seem to take it that well.

Rooster Teeth's Meg Turney, Ryan Haywood and Gus Sorola went into a conversation during a video about having 'a bone to pick with' people who review things lowly, claiming that Jeff Gerstmann had simply reviewed the game lower than the consensus for attention. They went so far as to get personal against the reviewer, completely ignoring his criticisms and his reasons for them.

This raised many eyebrows given that Rooster Teeth, known for their 'Achievement Hunter' videos and work with Machinima, had been paid by Bethesda to promote Fallout 4 with multiple videos - with the crew even wearing Fallout 4 merchandise on their wrists during their rant. With such a large gaming audience (currently maintaining over 8.3 million subscribers), this level of bias was sorely looked down upon by much of the gaming press and community.