We’re ending our first day of Game of the Year awards 2020 winners with this year’s biggest disappointment. While we don’t necessarily like to celebrate the bad, we like to give notice to the things that stuck out to us during the year so that we can learn from the past. 2020 was a year filled with assorted disappointments, not the least of which was how the COVID pandemic impacted things. While the industry is hearty and learned to adapt, 2020 still had a number of notable disappointments. Here are the PlayStation LifeStyle nominations for the Biggest Disappointment in 2020.
Biggest Disappointment of 2020
Cyberpunk 2077
The picture above is possibly my favorite Cyberpunk 2077 reaction image because it perfectly sums up how I’ve felt about the game’s disastrous launch and developer CD Projekt RED’s handling of it since. In addition to a mountain of bugs and issues, the game being nearly unplayable on last-gen consoles, and CDPR clumsily falling over itself trying to deal with the fallout, Cyberpunk 2077 simply isn’t the game we’ve been promised for years. It’s a kernel of a good idea surrounded by disparate ideas and half-baked systems that simply don’t equate to the generation-defining game that Cyberpunk was supposedly supposed to be.
It’s been completely removed from the PlayStation Store by Sony. Investors have started class-action lawsuits against CDPR for allegedly intentionally misleading everyone about the state of the game. And most of the talk around the game is not about the game itself, but the fumbled launch that broke a lot of trust CDPR had built up in the years since The Witcher III. It’s a lesson the video game industry will be looking back at for years to come, a moment that will come to define the conclusion of 2020
Reader’s Choice Winner (Loser?)
Cyberpunk 2077
You also thought Cyberpunk 2077 was the biggest disappointment. Perhaps it was the way CD Projekt RED handled the launch, or maybe it was just the fact that the game wasn’t what you expected. Amidst the launch of next-gen consoles, Cyberpunk’s next-gen version isn’t even set to release until next year at an unspecified date. Either way, Cyberpunk 2077 flew too high and came crashing back down. While some are at least enjoying various aspects of the game, it failed to even remotely live up to the expectations that both gamers and years of marketing gave it.
Don’t miss our full lineup of nominees for the PlayStation LifeStyle Game of the Year awards 2020. We’re just getting started with the winners and we’ll be revealing more all throughout the week, leading up to the Game of the Year on Friday January 1.
