None of this makes any sense.
I wanted an awards show so I made myself an awards show. This year MMO Fallout is proud to present the completely arbitrary awards I made up for 2020 because it’s my website and I get to decide who gets what award and why. Why? That’s my decision, I just told you that.
Everyone who wins an award should definitely be proud of their accomplishments in no small part to MMO Fallout being awarded Best Website To Receive Awards From in the 2020 MMO Fallout Arbitrary Awards. Remember; just because I made these awards up on the spot doesn’t mean they were decided without consideration. For everyone else, maybe there’s next year. You should all be proud of your accomplishments regardless.
I also wanted to make some awards that no other website will ever hand out. Because MMO Fallout is special. Special like a water balloon fork.
Let’s open the first envelope, Johnny. And I’ll see the rest of you in part two. Maybe.
The Caramel Onion Award For Most Disappointing Launch
Winner: Population Zero
Imagine biting into what you think is a caramel apple only to find out that you’ve been pranked and it’s actually a caramel coated raw onion. That’s the sort of betrayal and disappointment that this award is meant to invoke. I should note that it doesn’t mean “worst launch” but rather the quality of the launch versus expectations.
Population Zero is an online multiplayer game that somehow managed to launch without social tools for players to interact with or easily play with their friends. The developers over at Enplex Games LLC were slow on the draw for acknowledging major problems and in many cases never bothered to fix the things that were wrong. Since its launch Enplex has gone completely silent and all we know is that much of the team was laid off and replaced with contractors. Whether those contractors are still working is also unknown as the game hasn’t seen as much as a peep on social media for months.
Someone’s going to complain about the title for this because “I think raw onions covered in caramel is delicious, Connor!”
The Everlasting Gobstopper Award For Content Pipeline
Winner: Final Fantasy XIV
The Everlasting Gobstopper award goes to developers that just won’t quit, and this year that award goes to Final Fantasy XIV for the continued regular release of new content. Now Square Enix has had some delays as any company has with employees working from home over the past year, but Final Fantasy XIV continues to provide a ridiculous amount of content for its price. Rarely do you see other MMOs that use patches to forward the main series quest line between expansions, but FFXIV manages to put me further behind with every patch.
So cheers to FFXIV for continuing its pace and making the game ever more daunting for new players with each update.
The Hotel California Award For Keeping Players Playing
Winner: RuneScape (Both)
The Hotel California award recognizes games where you can log out any time you’d like, but you can never leave. Perhaps you told yourself for the tenth time that you were quitting and not coming back. Maybe you said it was exam season and you’d use the opportunity to quit out and find a new game to play. No matter your reason, all you know is that you’ve tried to stop playing this game more times than you can count, and it’s been over ten years, thousands of hours of game time, and hundreds of dollars in subscription fees but here you are at 2 in the morning grinding sharks to get to the next stage in the Yak Track.
Bring up RuneScape to a current RuneScape player and odds are they’ll tell you of all the times they quit and how they just ended up right back like nothing happened. New updates, new gear, new money making opportunities, or maybe their clan just got reinvested. Just accept that you are here forever and nothing can be done to kill RuneScape. You can stab it with your dragon knives but you just can’t kill the beast.
The Saran Wrap Award For Transparency
Winner: Enad Global 7 (EG7)
It’s crazy to think that an award for transparency would be going to the new owner of Daybreak Game Company. Scratch that, it’s crazy to think that we would have a definitive answer on who owns Daybreak Game Company. Scratch that, it’s insane to think that Daybreak Game Company would be winning an award that was positive. They’re not, their parent company is.
The fact that EG7 on virtually day one reversed years of DBG executives lying about everything like who owned them, what their ownership status of Standing Stone Games was, and things like subscriber count on Everquest makes them worthy of this award for transparency. The good news is that EG7 is probably not lying in their financial report, since that would definitely be illegal.
2021 will bring forward EG7’s plans for Daybreak Game Company’s assets. Will they care about the business and see it through to a new dawn, something the prior owners never seemed to care to, or will they chop it up and sell off the pieces, something that the prior owners seemed to want to do. Only time will tell.
The Andrew Martin Award For Intergenerational Success
Winner: Rockstar Games
Say what you want about Rockstar Games and Take Two and lord knows I’ve said a lot over the past couple of years, but it’s kinda crazy to think that Grand Theft Auto V launched on the PS3/360 era and never really exited the top seller list. It’s no surprise that both GTAV and Red Dead Redemption 2 are getting spun off into their multiplayer components and getting big upgrades for the next generation of consoles.
With the upgraded versions coming to the Series X and PS5, Rockstar Games will be supporting Grand Theft Auto V through three generations and presumably the game will still be raking in the GDP of a small island nation through all of this. Kids love shark cards as much as they wouldn’t understand a Joanie Loves Chachi analogy. Red Dead Redemption 2 is also seeing huge success albeit a notably smaller small island than GTAV.
In the same way that Andrew Martin survived multiple generations through Bicentennial Man, GTAV and Red Dead Redemption 2 will outlive their original consoles and presumably marry and die next to one of their descendants shortly after being legally recognized as human.
The Soupy Sales Ethical Microtransaction Award
Winner: Path of Exile
Path of Exile should probably win this just about every year. The Soupy Sales Ethical Microtransaction Award recognizes developers who have managed to look a gift horse in the mouth and say no thank you. Developers that eschew selling conveniences like instant level boosters or raid-ready gear in their cash shops. The wondrous folks who see the easy money they could get selling content piecemeal for hundreds of dollars (looking at you, Standing Stone) and say “not today, Satan. Not today.”
So of course this award goes to Path of Exile who continue to put together a great game without resorting to bad microtransactions. This coming from a game that regularly adds new content, updates, fixes, server support, and leagues. Path of Exile is seven years old and somehow the folks at Grinding Gear Games have managed to avoid wringing their eager customers for every last nickel in their pockets.
Unless you’re addicted to buying pets. You might be out of luck then.
The Capsule Machine Award For Best Tchotchkes
Winner: Prime Gaming
The Capsule Machine award recognizes services that offer neat little doohickeys for your favorite games and nobody carries that idea quite like Prime Gaming. Odds are you are subscribing to Amazon Prime for much bigger reasons than Prime Gaming but the fact that the service constantly hands out goodies for a wide swath of games is the icing on top. The sweet sweet icing.
Prime Gaming has served up tons of rewards this year for games like Destiny 2, RuneScape, GTA Online, Red Dead Online, among others. They’ve handed out membership, cosmetics, item packs, etc. For some games it’s a great reason to start playing them, or at least fill your comestic coffers a bit if you decide to jump in in the future.
The Third Act Vince Vaughn Movie Award For Most Improved
Winner: Black Desert Online
The Third Act Vince Vaughn Movie Award recognizes developers whose dev cycle has been like a Vince Vaughn movie, where they kinda screw around for the first two acts but then in the third act they get it all together and make a comeback for the big victory. This award recognizes devs that had their problems but mostly managed to look inward and improve on various aspects of their game/company.
Black Desert Online is a game that will have some detractors for winning any award, but I think they really deserve the award for most improved game in 2020. The seasonal servers alone are a huge boon to getting players up to speed on where content is, especially now that the game has like thirty thousand character classes with another class added roughly every six seconds. The seasonal servers told casual players that they could play too and get far enough to actually accomplish things.
And I really hope Pearl Abyss sees this article and adds the full title of the award to their accolades. Please do it, I know you read this website.
The Hideo Kojima “Friend Of MMO Fallout” Award
Winner: MassivelyOP
If Geoff Keighley gets to hand out friendship awards to Hideo Kojima at the Game Awards I should at least be allowed to have this. The Friend of MMO Fallout award recognizes those who went above and beyond in telling me that my research isn’t a total waste of time and energy. Over the course of the year specifically Bree over at MassivelyOP has worked with me on uncovering a few stories including the fraudulent Dragon’s Prophet that almost went up on Steam. MOP has also been kind enough to source MMO Fallout in those rare moments where I actually break a story people care about, rather than deliberately passing us over for secondary sources like most other big websites do.
The Friend of MMMO Fallout award is 100% biased and if they could play along and pretend that there was a real trophy involved it would be a big help. We hope the folks at MOP keep being awesome into the new year.
(Editor’s note: I am a Patreon supporter for MOP)
The $5 Hot-N-Ready Award For Low Quality Fact Checking
Winner: YongYea
This award recognizes those who bravely read Reddit and repeat the claims made on Reddit without verifying any of the allegations. The new generation of press uninhibited by obsolete ideas like integrity or effort. And the award goes to YouTuber YongYea for his video titled “NBA 2K21 Scams Players, Rare New Item Wasn’t In Paid Loot Boxes For 23 Minutes After Release.” The video, shown above, was released in November and makes the claim that 2K Games scammed players by not including a specific player in the card packs for 23 minutes.
His proof? It was posted on Reddit, and nobody ever lies on Reddit. But don’t worry because YongYea has corroborating evidence that the Reddit post was true; it was reposted on a bigger Reddit. And things don’t get upvoted on Reddit unless they are true. That’s not opinion, it’s science.
It’s a reminder that YouTubers like YongYea very rarely do any research or fact checking to verify claims before posting them as fact to take advantage of a community who see them as trustworthy figures of credibility and integrity. The video itself is only five minutes dedicated to the unverified scam, the last ten minutes spent talking about loot boxes in general. While no evidence has ever been presented from the community side of things, 2K Games has also not made public any comments about the claim.
And I specify that they haven’t made public any comments. I meanwhile spent the following couple of weeks after that video came out trying to hunt down someone who could get me some answers. And I got those answers that I didn’t even publish because it’s not really my area. But because this is my sandwich and I didn’t cook it so someone else could present it as their work, those answers will stay with me. Forever.
Unless someone at 2K decides to speak up about it of course. I’m not their mother.
The Kimulator Award For Unreasonable Steam Bans
Winner: BMC Studios
Before anyone says that this award is rude I’d like to point out that BMC Studio specifically requested the Worst Steam Developer of 2020 award. I can’t do that to them because they aren’t on Steam now. The Kimulator award acknowledges those who were banned from Steam and probably didn’t totally deserve it. BMC Studio has been on Steam since the Greenlight era with head honcho Alain Lagacé putting out incredibly strange and awkward titles that have slowly morphed into experimental interactive movies.
BMC Studio won’t be making any Christmas wishlists, however the games were pulled from Steam at the tail end of the year due to a Valve employee flagging the company as a troll. Harsh? You betcha. Deserved? Probably not. Valve has developed something of a habit of sudden shifts in policy and it looks like several established indie developers have become victim to the latest clamp on “troll” games.
If Mr. Lagacé wishes to pretend this award was for Worst Developer of 2020, he is free to do so. I don’t think he needs my permission to do it anyway.
MMO Fallout 