6 Huge Ass Gaming Problems Of 2020

6 Cyberpunk 2077's Cyberseizures

Gamers constantly looking for more challenging experiences might be saddened to discover that whiny players prevented them from playing Cyberpunk in a way that could have provided the definitive challenge of their lives. CD Projekt Red, makers of Cyberpunk 2077, introduced "braindance", a mechanic that would have players navigate the memories of NPCs by watching lightning effects that could trigger epileptic seizures and possibly also kill them.

While games have been associated with the risk of causing seizures, those using the more risky light patterns known to cause them typically feature explicit and unskippable messages before exposing players to any death rays. Below is the example Kotaku found for Assassin's Creed Valhalla.

CD Projekt mentioned the risk in the game's EULA -- that thing we all only know by name because no one's ever read one -- but not in an explicit unskippable message before the start of the game. Cyberpunk 2077 seemingly only caused one major seizure before the devs say they made it "safe for consumption," which you should probably take with a sea of salt considering this is the devs' idea of "ready for consumption."

5 Scalpers Take Over the Global Gaming Market

Prospects of a long-lasting quarantine caused many would-be gamers to try and get hold of a Nintendo Switch to avoid going mad pass the time. Neat idea ... too bad they ignored the other, older, ongoing pandemic: human greed. In May of 2020, scalpers from all over the country predicted with pro-gamer efficacy that a lot of people stuck at home would probably want to get a gaming system, so they bought-off as much of the available Nintendo Switch stock as they could to resell it at absurd prices.

As with all pandemics, that was merely the first wave, paving the way for a much worse second one. What May of 2020 saw happen on a country-wide scale, November saw on a worldwide one, as scalpers hijacked the release of the Playstation 5 and the Xbox Series X, buying-off most of the stock everywhere.

"Yuor w3lcome" 
-Definitely not hundreds of thousands of bots

Despite some welcome pushback by angry gamers who've created bonkers listings to troll scalpers, the console scalping business is at an all-time high with profits of over $39 million just the past year. And before you consider venturing into PC gaming, we have to warn you that getting a good graphics card is even harder because, on top of scalpers, one also has to deal with weirdos hoarding them to build their private Matrix, or whatever.

Better start preordering that KFConsole now.

4 A Game Nobody Liked Comes Back to Make People Despise it Even Harder

2017's The Culling is one of the first original games in the Battle Royale genre. However, not a full year after the first game's release, the devs launched The Culling 2. The sequel was basically the first game with the groundbreaking addition of game-breaking bugs. The Culling 2 came out in such a poor state that the player base dropped to the single digits in its first days. Those numbers are atrocious for a single-player game, but this is a game that specifically needs 100 players per match. Shortly after, the developers made the only sensible decision you're going to read about here and decided to kill off The Culling 2.

And the series stayed dead until the arrival of a year dumb enough to deserve it. Disclaimer: What you're about to read is not the plot of a spoof of EA's monetization strategies, but the actual business model of a real company.

In 2020, The geniuses behind The Culling 2 decided the series could totally make a comeback, provided they found a dumb enough business strategy. The "new" Culling, the game stopped making money off of crates and cosmetics, instead opted for charging players per each goddamn match. Again, a shady practice for a single-player game, but an especially shady one for a game where a match could very well last a mere seconds. The highly repulsive move cost the game nearly 75% of its player base, which is dramatic speech for saying it went from having 3 players to 0.7

3 Turns Out Esports Might Really Be Just Like Boxing

In August, Major esports Pro League ESL caught numerous Counter-Strike: Global Offensive teams using a spectator bug to gain an edge on professional matches. Counter-Strike pioneered the whole e-sports becoming a billion-dollar business and is still a big game nowadays, so this news will hit fans as completely inevitable.

The bug in question allowed coaches to spy the game area from any angle they chose, which obviously created an unfair advantage for at least 37 coaches from top teams making use of it.

ESL found out not only that teams were abusing the exploit at the time but had been doing so for several goddamn years. ESL states they won't reveal how to perform the glitch, probably in order to prevent the like four coaches who still don't know about it from getting a shot at a fair match.

2 Halo Is Apparently Under Quarantine

Halo Infinite is the Xbox's biggest bet, and Microsoft makes damn sure everyone knows about it. The new Xbox Series X even comes with a picture of Master Chief. 

Don't like him? Too bad. Throwing away the box won't save you, as the Chief is engraved on the console's power supply.

However, what's weird is that he's nowhere to be played yet, and even stranger still is how Halo Infinite has been in development for 7 years now. With the announced release date moving from the Series X's launch to "later, ok?!", two directors jumping ship, and the latest gameplay footage looking like ... uh ... this.

The dozens of non-scalpers who managed to get their hands on Xbox Series X are unsure whether the rumored-to-be most expensive game in video game history is going to come out before the next weirdly named Microsoft console.

1 Fish Performs Pokemiracle

Multiplication glitches, or "duping," are in high demand for speedrunners, the people who use exploits to run through an entire game faster than it takes to read this article. They are incredibly dedicated and efficient when it comes to discovering all sorts of ways to break games, so it came as a surprise when this new glitch that avoided speedrunners' eyes for nearly two decades was randomly discovered by a fish (called Lala). 

Mutekimaru, Lala's owner, decided to Tony Stark the hell out of his fish tank and turned it into a controller that'd input directions and actions based on Lala's moves.

He decided to upload videos of Lala's gameplay to YouTube, and the novelty garnered quite a few followers. In one of Lala's Pokemon Sapphire sessions, Muketimaru caught her not just beating a puzzle but also performing the never-before-seen miracle of boulder multiplication right before everyone's eyes.

You can see it here for everyone wanting to witness the majesty of a fish playing video games.

And it only took Lala 2,333 hours to do it! So nice to get a feel-good piece of weird news for a change. Well, at least if we ignore all the streamers and pro-gamers about to inevitably lose their jobs to fish in the near future.

Top image: CD Projekt, Schankz/Shutterstock