Obvious Beta is supposed to refer to when a game is so so unpolished and buggy as to be nigh-unplayable at launch. However, this trope often gets used for any game that's buggy on launch, regardless of playability. It's also prone to "the game was an Obvious Beta" type usage with no further context.

First, I'd suggest a rename because the current one is very subjective and vague. Second, the trope should be moved to Trivia or Audience Reactions.

Summary of Obivous Beta Wick Check:

• Game is genuinely nigh-unplayable at launch (9/50)
• Game is glitchy or missing things, but still playable (16/50)
• ZCE/Pothole (27/50)

1. Characters.Dead By Daylight Killers Part 2 - Obvious Beta: On release, Pinhead was by far one of the buggiest killers ever. When playing as him, the game would often crash if more than 1 survivor was killed (which seems to suggest the developers never expected him to kill more than 1 survivor, otherwise they would have encountered the bug during playtesting). His melee lunge was bugged so that he'd stop dead in his tracks if his momentum changed, preventing him from lunging around corners like other killers can. Also, his voice lines were completely missing.
2. Sword Art Online Abridged - Obvious Beta: In-universe. SAO has numerous glitches like being able to take guest NPCs out of their quest area, teleport crystals that sometimes Tele-Frag the user, and bosses that can kill themselves. It's also implied at several points that the game is widely unbalanced due to a general lack of play testing. Even the real life deaths were due to a glitch, which the creator claimed was intentional because at the time, he would rather be seen as the Big Bad than as incompetent.
3. Trivia.Roblox - The 2014 Egg Hunt put a damper on egg hunts taking place in an exclusive game, and events using exclusive games in general. The event was designed around a hub game that would transport players to several variants of the same map each with their own individual eggs to collect. The problem was, either as a result of working on several maps at once or just mismanagement in general, the event was such an Obvious Beta that it kept getting shut down mere minutes after opening up to players several times in succession for bug fixes, and still wasn't the most stable even after that.
4. XUniverse.Tropes M To R - Obvious Beta: The games tend to ship with a plethora of bugs, from annoying to game breaking. Reunion suffered from this in its plot (which was often impossible to complete), and Terran Conflict was a massive system hog for several months after release.
5. Quantity vs. Quality - In the short story "Superiority" by Arthur C. Clarke, this trope is fully analyzed. Two societies fight one another, one of which uses the newest, most up to date weaponry... and fails to conduct adequate testing before deployment. As a result, the new inventions have prohibitive logistical requirements or cause more damage to their own side than to the enemy. The other side sticks with tried-and-true technology that reliably works exactly the way that it should, and is much easier and faster to produce than the more advanced version... and they just keep plugging away on the production lines until they have numerical superiority. Guess which side wins.
6. ContentLeak.Video Games: An update in March 2018 accidentally opened a free raid quest meant for high-level players. It is playable for a few hours, but had numerous glitches such as untranslated Japanese text, Uriel's art as a placeholder, very few attack scripts, and no loot rewards. The raid in question revealed that Shiva would become a raid boss battle. Cygames quickly advised players not to participate in the raid for the risk of player data corruption. It was removed the day after.
7. Need for Speed - Obvious Beta (1 and 2):
   1. The console and PC releases of Undercover were shipped with severe frame rate issues. Absolute death in a high-speed racing game. The PS3, PC and Xbox 360 versions of the game at least got a patch that (mostly) fixes the frame rate issues, but ramped up the difficulty of the races as well. ProStreet had some framerate issues, too, but it didn't make the game unplayable.
   2. The Xbox 360 version of Shift tried to access the PlayStation Store.
8. SQIJ! - Obvious Beta: The ZX Spectrum version, and that's being generous. Not only is the game next to unplayable thanks to bugs and poor controls, but it even comes with the Laser BASIC utility still on it.
9. Fable II - Obvious Beta: On launch, the game lacked much of the promised multiplayer support, though a patch was available to add much of it. More serious are the instabilities and bugged quests that can make the game unbeatable, of which Lionhead has presently acknowledged two serious ones.

1. Tomb Raider: Underworld - Obvious Beta: Downplayed, but still noticeable. The issues range from annoying, but tolerable - such as wildly inconsistent fall damage - to outright Game-Breaking Bug - like plot-important objects or entire areas not spawning/loading properly.
2. Kamen Rider Climax Heroes:
   1. Kamen Rider: Climax Heroes (Playstation 2), includes main Riders from Kuuga to Decade as well as a few hidden secondary riders that don't necessarily have complete movesets. Many Riders have the ability to change into various forms...but only for a limited amount of time.
   2. Kamen Rider: Climax Heroes Fourze (Wii and PSP again). Guess who got added in this update. Showa Riders also got added, OOO got all his forms except for TaMaShii, you can now do tag battles where you can change between two Riders mid-fight or use your Super Gauge to summon your other character to sandwich the opponent, and all the Obvious Beta characters finally got a Finishing Move as well as a pseudo Super Mode where their power increases and a few of their combos change.
   3. Obvious Beta: Some of the secret characters don't have a Super Mode or even a finisher. Nega Den-O doesn't have the abilities we would expect from him, Gatack and the twin Hoppers only have their signature finishing moves as special moves but no cinematic finisher, AutoVajin is a complete joke with almost no moves (maybe it's a case of Joke Character) and poor Garren has no finisher or Jack Form while his buddy Blade has all of it plus King form.
      1. Corrected in Fourze, all the incomplete characters got new/improved moves, a finishing move and can use their Super Gauge to enter a temporary Super Mode with increased power and a few different combos.
3. VideoGame.Rayman 1 - Obvious Beta: While technically not one, the Jaguar original certainly feels like one compared to its ports, although it does manage to have some exclusive features not seen in later versions. On top of that game, the game as a whole was never properly playtested, and the absolutely sadistic difficulty shows for it.
4. Horrible.Video Game Soundtracks: If there's one place where it's evident that Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood was an Obvious Beta, it's the music. The battle themes are the only original tracks, and sound alright, if badly-compressed and converted, but everything else is really botched MIDI versions of tracks from earlier games which are barely recognizable and utterly devoid of energy or fun. Compare the original version of Sonic 3's final boss theme, then the remake for Chronicles. Supposedly, Bioware had an all-original soundtrack prepared for the game, but due to legal issues, most of it had to be thrown out at the last second and the team hastily recreated existing songs from previous games to replace them, resulting in the barely above-Game.com-quality music you hear in the final product.
5. VideoGame.Ghost Master - Obvious Beta: Not in the typical fashion, but the game ended on a cliffhanger, despite the lack of sequel. Thankfully, the final mission, bringing a more satisfying end, was released for download via the internet and packaged with the Steam version.
6. WhatHappenedToTheMouse.Video Games - As far as worgen players are concerned, the worgen storyline drops off the face of the Earth after the worgen player completes the starter zone and is shipped off to Darkshore to become a night elf with fur. This also overlaps with Obvious Beta in that the continuation of the worgen story only appears in quests that are exclusive to the other faction; to see the whole story, the worgen player would have to reroll a Horde character. The Alliance version of Shadowfang Keep references the events of the Horde-exclusive storyline, causing many an Alliance player to wonder who Ivar Bloodfang is, why he thinks Crowley is a coward, and why he wants the suddenly back from the dead trio of Godfrey, Walden, and Ashbury killed so bad.
7. YMMV.Clannad - Obvious Beta: Though the Sekai Project English release is perfectly stable, there is a noticeable amount of typos and grammatical errors in the text.
8. SNK vs. Capcom: SVC Chaos - Obvious Beta: It's not a secret to those who dug deeper into this game that pretty much everything in it could be as good as in Capcom vs. SNK 2.
9. Tecmo Bowl - Obvious Beta: Tecmo Super Bowl III had several features that had been implemented without perfecting them, including but not limited to...
   1. Players had a chance to avoid a direct contact tackle by spinning. After the spin, if there were any computer controlled players on top of them, they wouldn't be able to tackle, they'd just go through the player. This resulted in easy 50+ yard runs for computer controlled running backs.
   2. Players could jump to avoid a diving tackle. If they were too near the top of the screen and jumped, the game considered it out of bounds.
   3. If a runner and a defender collided, the runner would sometimes attempt to either push the defender back, or run dragging the defender who was hanging on his leg. If a player controlled player had this happen to them, they'd be easily slowed down for a tackle, but computer controlled players could sometimes drag or push a character for 20 yards at full speed.
10. Total War: Rome II
    1. Never Trust a Trailer: The Carthage Battle Gameplay Demo remains infamous among the Total War fanbase for advertising Rome II inaccurately. The game's significant issues on release or Missing Trailer Scenes aside, it portrays Rome's forces manning their encirclement defenses, the city of Carthage having been worn and damaged from the siege, and the city's buildings actively breaking during the battle with civilians inside it which are all mechanics that do not actually exist in the game.
    2. Obvious Beta: A criticism among some fans and reviewers, citing Executive Meddling on Sega's part to have the game released earlier than originally intended. That said, patches moved the game along into the right direction, making significant tweaks and improvements on the gameplay. Averted, by the end of 2018, the game has been put in an extremely stable and polished state, enough it's considered an excellent game in its own right. Rome wasn't built in a day.
11. Unreal Tournament - Obvious Beta:
    1. The map AS-Rook has a glitching wall (in an area which couldn't be reached, anyway).
    2. There's an invisible collision box in DM-Pyramid which wasn't fixed.
12. DanceDanceRevolution - Yes, DDR V is a buggy mess right now. That’s the point of the open alpha. Please do not put it under Obvious Beta, or Porting Disaster in YMMV, at this time; wait for the release build. Commented out note
13. Need for Speed - Obvious Beta (3):
    1. The 2015 reboot was released on consoles without even a manual transmission option, which was a standard feature even in arcade racing games before the Criterion era. Some players even found a non-functioning "Semi-adjustable Gearbox" part, suggesting transmission tuning was cut. The PC version was delayed by 4 months to prevent the porting issues Rivals had. By the time the PC version came out, every version of the game was updated to include a manual transmission option, but other problems came to light: gear ratios for most cars were not only un-adjustable, but wildly inaccurate, and most cars magically grew extra gears when power upgrades not related to the transmission were added. A Civic can have up to 8 speeds in this game.
14. Cartoon Network: Punch Time Explosion - Obvious Beta: There's a ton of lazy development quirks that almost make the game unplayable. Unresponsive controls, an unfinished battle system, and an unintuitive control scheme that even the veteran Smash player finds hard to get used to. There's also a quite infamous bug that freezes the game during one of the final levels. Granted, there are ways to bypass this bug (many people did it just by sheer luck) but it's still a problem that makes the game a textbook example of Obvious Beta.
15. Red Ninja: End of Honor - Obvious Beta: This game might not have bugs per se, but it makes so many baffling design choices that it couldn't have had proper playtesting. The issues with the camera, the dash mechanic, critical hits, body part targeting, and especially the Seduction mechanic could be fixed without altering much of the game and it would make the game much better.
16. FranchiseKiller.Video Games (2-11):
    1. Theorized to be an Ashcan Copy on Activision's part (as their rights to use the Tony Hawk videogame license were set to expire the year of THPS 5's release), the game was eviscerated by fans and reviewers across the board for its lifeless visuals (which were heavily criticized in pre-release footage and screenshots), poorly-designed gameplay mechanics, and heaping lack of technical polish.
    2. Blacksite: Area 51 is an interesting chicken-or-the-egg case. While the game is so atrociously bad that it ensured no future Area 51 games would be made, the game's Obvious Beta glitches and other signs of having been rushed out the door are an indication that Midway Games was already on the brink of collapse.
    3. Developed by Midway's San Diego studio after the former Atari Games had been closed down, it is an Obvious Beta, with a lot of old standby techniques gone (like not being able to shoot potions), and none of the "new features" touted for the game anywhere.
    4. Ridge Racer Vita was panned heavily across the board by reviewers for being a total rush job of a game^note for what it's worth, Ridge Racer Vita was released as a launch title for the platform, which may indicate how the game got in that state in the first place, with a hideous lack of base content and modes compared to past titles (with the first pack of DLC containing material that could have easily been added to the base game), offering no new material (all of the courses and vehicles being recycled from Ridge Racer 7), and a poorly-implemented online mode that determines a player's speed based on their experience level, which automatically renders any race Unwinnable by Design for newcomers.
    5. The double whammy of Clayfighter 63 1/3 and Clayfighter X-Treme ultimately killed the ClayFighter franchise. 63 1/3 is an Obvious Beta with dated graphics, annoying voice clips and glitchy, unbalanced gameplay. Although the game was a modest commercial success, its critical reception was so bad that Interplay released a Director's Cut six months later that addresses some (but not all) of the gameplay and balancing issues of 63 1/3.
    6. However, it quickly divided fans with a myriad of flaws, most noticeably its broken physics, different gameplay and character designs, and heavy recycling of content from its predecessors.^note This sentiment is reflected by reviewers in retrospective pieces.
    7. Once they saw how well it did, though, they decided to kick off an entire series with a sequel, Return to Krondor... which, unsurprisingly, is woefully unfinished and underpolished, making this a bad enough experience for Feist that he's been unwilling to risk a repeat experience.
    8. However, the third installment was handed off to a different team, got Christmas Rushed, and had to work on both PS3 and PS4, which resulted in an Obvious Beta. This also meant the main advertised feature of the game, its online multiplayer, didn't really work, as a result of the massive amount of bugs, lack of crossplay, and clumsy netcoding.
    9. While the game's art and music are amazing, the gameplay is questionable at best; an over-reliance on the incredibly gimmicky "Reel System" (which is used for everything from attacks to leveling up) and a skipped beta phase means the game has a patched-together feel.
    10. The franchise was dormant for a decade afterwards, until an attempt was made to revive it... first as an Allegedly Free Game for mobile devices, then with the visually impressive but buggy and content-deficient Rollercoaster Tycoon World.

1. [Trope Name] Injokes: Example from Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) that snarks and complains about its plot or its Obvious Beta gameplay and Loads and Loads of Loading. May or may not cover up what happens after The Very Definitely Final Dungeon in spoilers, because to the gaming community, it's the Signature Scene they all know. It would be cut or rewritten, but the troper community agrees about it enough to not touch it.
2. Civvie 11:
   1. Overused Running Gag: In-universe Civvie is forbidden from using Gordon Ramsey's "It's fucking raw" clip after peppering it all over his review of Blood II. Daring to do so anyway results in immediate punishment, usually electrocution. Similar bans are in place for Monty Python references and bad puns.
   2. Pet the Dog: He's quick to point out when a game suffered from Executive Meddling, such as Blood II: The Chosen being shoved out the door in an Obvious Beta state or Marvel forcing X-Men: The Ravages of Apocalypse to be Christmas Rushed. In these cases, his jabs against the developers are half-hearted while his real anger is directed toward the publishers.
3. DespairEventHorizon.Web Original: The GameSpot video review of Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing is all about reviewer Alex Navarro being broken by an even more broken game (while not saying a word, no less!).
4. ShowWithinAShow.Webcomics - * Homestuck features several. The most prominent is Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff, a Stylistic Suck parody of Two Gamers on a Couch webcomics ostensibly made by Dave Strider; most of the cast often quote it to each other, and segments of it sometimes show up in the narration as part of Homestuck's love of the Meaningful Echo. The three previous MS Paint Adventures series also exist, both as comics and as videogames, as well as a fictional fourth adventure about the Midnight Crew. In the Midnight Crew universe, which is really in the far future of the troll universe, Homestuck exists on MS Paint Adventures. Also present are Squiddles!, a Sickeningly Sweet television series which is actually mankind's subconscious representation of certain Eldritch Abominations; Game Bro, a Straw Critic gaming magazine; Grand Snack Fuckyeah, a thoroughly broken skateboarding game/Product Placement bonanza; and Complacency of the Learned, a wizard story Rose is writing and appears in the post-Scratch Earth as a series. Wizardy Herbert (a fanfic about the Post-scratch version of Complacency written by Roxy) also makes a brief appearance.
5. YMMV.Free Guy - Alternate Character Interpretation: Antwan is definitely a Corrupt Corporate Executive, a Manchild, and a Mean Boss already, but over the course of his Villainous Breakdown, he becomes full-blown Ax-Crazy and personally destroys the servers for Free City to keep it from being discovered that it was built using the code of Life Itself. Was he always a selfish sociopath who only cares about money and would resort to violence for his own benefit, or is he taking drastic but necessary action to protect himself and his company from an awful scandal? After all, he's already facing a lawsuit from Millie, and she'd definitely win if it was made public that he stole the code of Life Itself to make Free City, and such a secret could destroy his company, his reputation, and his career. Not to mention that the movie unfolds as Soonami is preparing to launch Free City 2, so Antwan is under extra pressure to make sure it goes as smoothly as possible, especially since he knows Free City 2 is an Obvious Beta and there will definitely be backlash after it releases. Even his destruction of the servers may be justified in his mind — he already planned to shut down Free City once Free City 2 launched, so Antwan may just see destroying the servers as getting rid of hardware that was going to be replaced or upgraded soon anyway.
6. WMG.Pump It Up - As for the evil spirit in the sword, she too has a backstory of her own. Again, going by the "Cross Soul" BGA, it is possible that her fate in the drug trade was "sealed" when she was kidnapped or seized off the streets, and over the years, she ended up rising through the ranks to become a ruthless drug baroness herself. Unless she is stopped, she will continue her campaign and leave even more addicts dead. Only time and the future release of the conspicuously absent "Cross Ray" BGA will tell if she's properly dealt with at the end.
7. Trivia.Soul Series - Due to Executive Meddling, as mentioned above, Soulcalibur V was only ¼ finished when it was released. The resulting Obvious Beta was met with a great deal of backlash.
8. NeverLiveItDown.Video Games - ** Titus Software existed from 1985–2005 and developed many games, one of them being Prehistorik, but most people only remember them as "that company that developed Superman 64"^note Most of the poor decisions were in fact because of ridiculous mandates by Warner Bros. and DC e.g. the virtual world setting came about because they didn't want Superman to hurt "real" people, and in fact Titus' E3 1998 demo showed a very different game that looked and played superior to the "finished" product before Warner/DC mandates screwed them over.
9. Donkey Kong Country - Except for GBA DKC3, which has a separate theme for Arich, but NOT for K. Rool! It seems they ran out of time when making the game's completely new soundtrack.
10. TimeyWimeyBall.Video Games
    1. The Obvious Beta action-adventure game The Time Machine runs into a more literal version of this. Time is like a flat plane in the setting, and by travelling to the future, Wales causes his time and the future to become tied together by the time machine itself, pulling time together into a whirlpool of sorts that starts destroying time as he knows it. Which makes absolutely no physical sense, but serves to explain why returning to his previous time(and thus putting himself and the Time Machine back in the time where they belong) prevents any further damage to the time plane.
    2. God help anyone trying to understand the way time travel works in The 3rd Birthday — though it's likely that most of the problems were caused by the game's Troubled Production and far from final script draft. Sometimes, changing the past causes complicated butterfly effects that lead to other characters being alive. Other times, it causes people to become paradoxed out of existence, Back To The Future-style. Other times it causes people to become temporal ghosts unable to interact with normal events. Whether other characters can remember previous timelines seems essentially random.
11. Funny.Games Done Quick: Klaige's run of Super Pitfall from AGDQ 2015 is already something special, thanks to the game's cryptic and broken nature, but the highlight comes at the end of the run. After completing all of the objectives, Klaige repeatedly kills himself on the nearest enemy, getting a game over. The game return to the title screen, starts up the Attract Mode... and immediately cuts to the victory screen. Apparently, game overs don't clear the flag for completing everything, and since the game requires you to go back to the beginning of the map to finish it, this is the quickest way to complete the game.
12. Nintendo 64 - Custom Robo 1 and 2, Sin and Punishment^note A notorious example as the game actually features full English voice acting, and Animal Forest are the most famous Japan exclusive base N64 games. The latter two later showed up respectively on Wii Virtual Console and GameCube (as Animal Crossing), but Custom Robo wasn't so lucky. The original Pokémon Stadium wasn't localized either, but international players didn't miss much because it's an Obvious Beta for Pokémon Stadium 2 (which was released as simply Pokémon Stadium).
13. MadeInCountryX.Real Life - American- or Taiwanese-developed NES games tend to get this treatment as well. They're either an unlicensed Obvious Beta or they suffer from The Problem with Licensed Games or both.
14. Characters.Free Guy - Obvious Beta: Again, Antwan pressed the dev team into patching him into Free City before he was even finished.
15. Horrible.Game Mods
    1. Fire Emblem has an extensive hacking community, so naturally a lot of stinkers turn up. One of the biggest problems is that most "total conversion" hacks tend to get abandoned before the halfway point; it's rare for most of these hacks to ever make it past the first few chapters before ending abruptly and leaving whatever story was being established up in the air. Meanwhile, "balance" or "challenge" hacks are either laughably unbalanced or unfairly difficult, and may also be buggy due to a lack of testing. Some other extremely common issues for any type of hack are poorly designed maps with equally poor enemy placement, high level foes that the player must defeat long before it would be feasible for them to do so, unbalanced character stats and growths that either make the game too easy (no one has any poor stats at any point, resulting in an army of juggernauts) or too hard (none of the characters' stats go up reliably, resulting in a weak team well into high levels), terrible sprite work, and poor quality music.
    2. Mortal Kombat Chaotic^note as well as its older incarnation, Mortal Kombat Anthology, and its original incarnation Mortal Kombat Special Edition is a grandiose example of quantity over quality: despite the promising main menu screen and its incorporation of even the most obscure MK characters^note Duroc, Belokk, Karbrac and Hydro to name a few, the game thrives off of stolen characters and stages from all across MUGEN databases, as evidenced by the wildly varying quality of them. It has a particularly large roster of 300+ characters, and an additionally gigantic list of stages. However, despite this (or perhaps because of this), the game is extremely buggy and is prone to having major glitches: the music stutters, glitches or comes to a total stop, characters freeze in place even after the match, which can lead to the game softlocking. On top of the softlocks, the game is also prone to freezing, or just outright crashing for no reason whatsoever. While it is unknown if the game devs made any of the characters, the roster consists of multiple variations of several characters (including over 17 Sub-Zeroes), yet the majority of them play exactly the same way, even if some are completely nonsensical ^note Plasma Kang and Red Scorpion are prime examples. Other characters are also bizarre and poorly made, with either junky or downright abysmal sprites ^note  Bear Sub-Zero (yes, really), Daegon, Shadow Priest(s), Blaze, etc. - horribly broken, beyond cheap AI even for MK standards ^note Sensei Liu Kang, Fronzen (sic) Sub-Zero, etc. - utterly ridiculous Game Breakers that can end a match in seconds ^note  Riuky, Simon, Hsu Hao (again, we're serious), etc. - and nonsensical Original Generation characters that are either given no backstory ^note  the rather infamous Pantherk, Fusion, Nightspirits and a black-garbed ninja simply named Generick Ninja, or otherwise simply shoehorned into the game's intro storytelling.^note Unknown "dark forces and Satanic" which "secretly joined" the MK tournament during the events of 3, Akuma being in the game due to "mixed dimensions". The intro itself is just a butchered, Engrish edition of UMK3's intro with some other spontaneous subplots shoehorned in. The game also has poor character announcements, some with different voice clips mashed together that do not match each other, poorly made original voice clips (such as for Sensei Liu Kang and the Fro(n)zen Sub-Zeroes), and some using text-to-speech. The fatalities, when they're not just canonical ones, are also either nonsensical, painfully mundane (several fatalities are just different methods of decapitation), or they simply do not work (Daegon's fatality has him do an uppercut...that misses, and then a second later the opponent drops dead). MRGSTAR321 shows the "chaotic" disaster in its purest in his second playthrough of the game, while Joel of Vinesauce fame has his fun trashing the project as well.
    3. Schoolvania, a ROM hack of Castlevania. It's plagued with horrid level design, is obviously untested, and despite its name, doesn't really have anything to do with school. Bottomless pits are virtually everywhere, which is a problem in a game that already has recoil and stiff jump physics. Ironically, it makes some parts easier because some enemies just walk straight into these pits. Some segments require you to damage boost to proceed, and you can't even make it to Death because the blocks are arranged in a way where it's impossible to proceed. See I-Mockery, well, mock it here.
16. Executive Meddling - See also Music Is Politics, Obvious Beta, Media Watchdog, Moral Guardians, and Alan Smithee.
17. Trivia.Psychotoxic - Troubled Production: The game took six years to make and shipped in an Obvious Beta state, as elaborated upon in this video from DXFan619, who refers to it as "The Craziest Game Ever Made".
18. Meteo Chronicles - Obvious Beta: The game was obviously this and still is until the final release on 2.0 in early 2023.
19. Fusion Generation II - That One Level: Players tend to have trouble completing Laboratory C without a guide because like a few of the labs it was not completely finished.
20. Backhanded Apology - The launch of Warcraft III: Reforged was a complete disaster, being a blatantly unfinished mess that was rushed to release in time for 2020's fiscal year, with many features missing from the original Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos while lacking the cinematic cutscenes shown in its 2018 trailer, Game-Breaking Bugs and disconnections galore, and updating the EULA to grant Blizzard exclusive ownership over any and all custom content for fear of another DOTA scenario. To make matters worse, Reforged was merged with and overwrites the original game, meaning all of the problems with Reforged retroactively affect the original game regardless of whether the user buys Reforged or not. Fans were understandably furious, and eventually Blizzard issued an official statement addressing complaints... that refused to accept responsibility and attempted to shift blame to the fans for their high expectations that Blizzard themselves set with their 2018 trailer. It went about as well as you'd think it would, with Blizzard's reputation being self-damaged further.
21. CreatorKiller.Video Games - 7 wicks here, all of which are either potholes or lack context
22. Towns - Obvious Beta: Well, at least when one bought it.
23. WMG.Sonic The Hedgehog - It'll turn out that Generations somehow reestablished 06 as part of the main timeline (the reappearance of Crisis City seems to hint at that) and enabled Mephiles to return. Only this time, he won't be shackled down by a crappy Obvious Beta game and free to exercise his Magnificent Bastardry to his fullest extent.
24. Gecko Ending - The original 1988 Japanese computer versions of Snatcher were rushed for release, concluding the story on the cutoff point before third and the final act, even though a proper ending was already written for the game. SD Snatcher featured a very different version of the ending than what was actually included in the later CD-ROM-based remakes of the original Snatcher. For example, unlike the CD-ROM version, Randam actually survives at the end of SD Snatcher.
25. CriticalDissonance.Video Games - 8 wicks, all are either potholes or lack context
26. Auto-Scrolling Level - Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) features areas of Sonic's levels that have been dubbed by one speedrun as "Mach Speed Zones." Sonic is forced to run forward, jumping and dodging obstacles, and can not leave his assigned course by too much or get hit by too many objects unless he wants to breakdance into oblivion.
27. FranchiseKiller.Video Games (1): The original Spyro the Dragon series was torpedoed by his first game without developer Insomniac Games, Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly. An Obvious Beta of a game that had its development cycle fast-tracked for a holiday release at publisher Universal Interactive's behest, it was mostly panned by reviews and fans alike, and led to fans more or less ignoring the following title Spyro: A Hero's Tail.