History ObviousBeta / VideoGames

* While ''VideoGame/LeagueOfLegends'' went live without many hitches, Yorick the Gravedigger was an Obvious Beta. When he was released, he was considered worthless because his abilities were, well, practically a beta. His ult was also supposedly changed from development to release and was full of bugs. While the bugs of his kit were eventually ironed out, he still suffered from extremely poor design, and out of all the champions, Yorick had the dubious honor of never being included in the weekly free champion rotation. When Yorick was relaunched in 2016 with a brand new kit and model, the entire fanbase rejoiced.

* ''VideoGame/TalesOfCrestoria'': The game launched with very poor performance on Android phones, constant game crashes and softlocks during battles, unusable features such as the chat function, daily missions that would inexplicably lock for 12 hours a day, and reward glitches causing clear and arena rewards to not appear in people's inventories. Unfortunately, the game, despite getting most of the glaring issues fixed by its first anniversary, and getting a more positive reception, announced it would close down by February 2022.

* ''VideoGame/MegaManBattleNetwork1'' is laden with stiff and clunky mechanics, and the characters are flat and all suffer one form or another of EarlyInstallmentWeirdness regarding their characterization. It's also extremely short and easily beatable in under ten hours, less than half that of any other game in the series. While it was still good enough to serve as a foundation for the rest of the series, [[VideoGame/MegaManBattleNetwork2 the sequel]] released nine months later [[SurprisinglyImprovedSequel makes the first game's beta status painfully obvious by comparison]].

* ''VideoGame/ETTheExtraTerrestrial'' was made by a single developer who was given only five weeks to make it so that [[ChristmasRushed it would make it in time for Christmas]]. As such, it was an utter mess. It was a confusing, unintuitive, ugly-looking game that bore no resemblance to [[Film/ETTheExtraTerrestrial the movie it was based on]] (though to be fair there's very little if anything in ''E.T.'s'' plot that lends itself well to a video game adaptation.) The backlash from this was so bad that a completely different version of this game planned for the Platform/Atari5200 was aborted. Atari, figuring they had a [[CashCowFranchise license to print money]], made more copies of this game than there were consoles, expecting a [[KillerApp system seller]]. Needless to say, Atari had a very, very large amount of unsold games on their hands that became the bulk of Atari's "buried treasure", namely [[http://kotaku.com/e-t-found-in-new-mexico-landfill-1568100161 a landfill in New Mexico where they dumped all their leftover inventory]] before exiting console and computer markets after the game turned out to be the harbinger of MediaNotes/TheGreatVideoGameCrashOf1983. In recent years the game has started to [[VindicatedByHistory gain a more positive reputation]] - it will never be a highlight of the 2600 library but it's pretty damn impressive for something done by one guy in five weeks, especially compared to some of the other entries on this page.

* ''VideoGame/ETTheExtraTerrestrial'' was made by a single developer who was given only five weeks to make it so that [[ChristmasRushed it would make it in time for Christmas]]. As such, it was an utter mess. It was a confusing, unintuitive, ugly-looking game that bore no resemblance to [[Film/ETTheExtraTerrestrial the movie it was based on]]. The backlash from this was so bad that a completely different version of this game planned for the Platform/Atari5200 was aborted. Atari, figuring they had a [[CashCowFranchise license to print money]], made more copies of this game than there were consoles, expecting a [[KillerApp system seller]]. Needless to say, Atari had a very, very large amount of unsold games on their hands that became the bulk of Atari's "buried treasure", namely [[http://kotaku.com/e-t-found-in-new-mexico-landfill-1568100161 a landfill in New Mexico where they dumped all their leftover inventory]] before exiting console and computer markets after the game turned out to be the harbinger of MediaNotes/TheGreatVideoGameCrashOf1983.
* The Atari 2600 port of ''VideoGame/PacMan'' is sometimes accused of being one, to the point where there's a myth that the game was released as soon as Atari got their hands on the programmer's alpha version (the reality is rather more nuanced). The game is infamously unable to draw all the ghosts on screen at once.[[note]]This relates to the Atari 2600's limited capabilities for drawing moving objects; other games on the system with many moving objects ran into this problem, though none suffered as badly as Pac-Man. CRT screens also had phosphor decay that allowed the ghosts to stay on screen for longer and partially mitigated the flickering.[[/note]] It also looked ugly, at least partly because Atari didn't want games to have black backgrounds unless they were set in space.

* The rushed PAL release of ''Metropolis Street Racer'' for the Dreamcast was riddled with game-breaking, save-corrupting bugs. Sega quickly recalled it, but the second version was still somewhat buggy. The third PAL release, as well as the NTSC release, were more solid.

* When the ''Leviathan'' DLC for ''VideoGame/EuropaUniversalisIV'' was released, the game became littered with ridiculous bugs, such as the ability to [[https://www.reddit.com/r/eu4/comments/n1181t/you_can_cancel_monument_construction_in_other/ cancel constructions in other countries]] or your monarch getting [[https://www.reddit.com/r/eu4/comments/n0339g/i_see_your_666_ruler_and_raise_you_a_buggy_update/ blatantly unplausible stats]].

** ''VideoGame/PokemonGoldAndSilver'' were ''somewhat'' less of an obvious beta, but it was fairly clear that there was a decent amount of copy-and-paste between the two generations -- not entirely unheard of in those old days, especially when getting a giant game to run on a potato like the original Game Boy/Game Boy Color took all the hacks and prayers one could shove into the cartridge. ''Crystal'', like ''Yellow'' before it, fixed quite a few, but the way that some of the earlier-fixed bugs actually translated from ''[=RGB=]'' '''directly''' to ''GS'' made it clear that the transfer and development had begun before ''Yellow'''s release. Even then, some playtesting errors crept in, like a Pokémon's sex being tied specifically to their attack IV -- which means that if you want a female Totodile, for example, enjoy its 1 ATK value.

* ''VideoGame/TheKingOfFighters XII'': The playable character roster had been cut nearly in half between ''XI'' and ''XII'' (a few players browsed through the index files of the Platform/Xbox360 version and discovered files for several unused characters in the game such as Yuri and Takuma Sakazaki, fan-favorite Mai Shiranui, and long-unused ''VideoGame/FatalFury'' SubBoss Hwa Jai), the main arcade mode is little more than a glorified time trial with only five stages and no proper end boss (though given [[SNKBoss SNK's reputation for making extremely punishing bosses]], this change could be seen as a good thing), and until a version 1.02 patch fixed it, the netcode for online play was extremely unreliable, leaving some players stuck on the loading screen for minutes before even being able to select a character. The fact that all of the characters that were datamined from leftover files in ''XII'' showed up in ''XIII'' proves that ''XII'' was an obvious beta.

* ''VideoGame/PokemonScarletAndViolet'' are the buggiest games in the series since ''VideoGame/PokemonRedAndBlue'', featuring an eye-watering framerate caused by memory leak issues, clipping errors galore, animation bugs, atrocious texture quality anf filtering and semi-frequent game crashes. The title shows clear signs of being [[ChristmasRushed Christmas Rushed]] for Holiday 2022.

** ''VideoGame/PokemonGoldAndSilver'' were ''somewhat'' less of an obvious beta, but it was fairly clear that there was a decent amount of copy-and-paste between the two generations -- not entirely unheard of in those old days, especially when getting a giant game to run on a potato like the original Game Boy/Game Boy Color took all the hacks and prayers one could shove into the cartridge. ''Crystal'', like ''Yellow'' before it, fixed quite a few, but the way that some of the earlier-fixed bugs actually translated from ''[=RGB=]'' '''directly''' to ''GS'' made it clear that the transfer and development had begun before ''Yellow'''s release. Even then, some playtesting errors crept in, like a Pokemon's sex being tied specifically to their attack IV -- which means that if you want a female Totodile, for example, enjoy its 1 ATK value.

* ''VideoGame/PostalIII''. While the ''VideoGame/{{Postal}}'' series isn't known for its high production values, the game's initial release suffers from frequent crashing on some systems, the AI failing, broken Steam achievements, and sound issues, [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRJIXCPYY6c among other things]]. Additionally, the style was quite a departure from what RWS had in mind before Akella took over production, making it much more cartoonish. Free-roam mode was cut and later put out in a patch, and there is no multiplayer, despite its development being credited, as it was canned at some point. The game was quite underpromoted and wasn't out on Steam until two months after its official release date, instead having to be purchased directly from RWS' website or other minor retailers, because Akella, in the last of their many weird decisions brought about by an economic downturn that caused they to lay off their primary dev team early in development, was too cheap to send it in to get an ESRB rating. Reception (fan and critical) is mixed to negative, with one of RWS' developers saying "the whole thing was rather tragic" and RWS since declaring it CanonDiscontinuity.