‘Worst Game Of The Year’ Lists Are Calling Out The Wrong People
Nobody sets out to make a bad thing.
When a fledgling Developer/Designer/Artist etc. is hired to work on a new project, they don't go into it saying "I hope I do a bad job". These people are living their dreams, they finally get to make video games for a living and work in a team of people who share the same passion and goals. Then after years of blood, sweat and tears, after time spent away from family and after sleepless nights knowing that the quality of the product they've made isn't where they'd like it to be, the publisher makes them push it out the door unfinished. Then, at the end of the year, some asshole exclaims that all of that effort was wasted on making the "Worst Game Of The Year".
It's shitty.
Understand that I'm not saying you can't be critical of a game. You can review a game and point out the things you do and don't like about it, and you can advise the game-buying public of whether their hard-earned money is worth spending on a product and give it an arbitrary number that pertains to the quality of the product, but singling those developers out and calling their art "the worst" is reductive and doesn't help the industry in any way. It's just clickbait, simple as that.
This also includes categories like "Most Disappointing" and the ilk, because I can guarantee nobody was more disappointed in your pick for that category than the people who made it. It's just not constructive in any way to say "Hey, developer, we sure did hate your game. Maybe try harder next time?" when that developer was under time crunch for however many months just to make sure you had something to keep you occupied for a few hours and distract you from whatever sad shit is happening in the world.
If you'd like to be more constructive with these kind of articles, may I suggest going with articles like "Worst Publisher Of The Year" or "Worst CEO Of The Year"?, that way your outrage is pointed in the right direction - at the company that put out the game - rather than the developers who made it, because the higher-ups are the ones pushing for these overworked engineers and artists to get their "product" out as fast as possible to both save money and also make back as much money as possible, as fast as possible.
So a hearty FUCK YOU to Ubisoft's Yves Guillemot, Xbox's Phil Spencer and Matt Booty, Playstation's Hermen Hulst and Hideaki Nishino and WB's David Zaslav. These people were responsible for some of the biggest cluster-fucks this year when it came to pushing games out that were unfinished and having the devs take the fall, like any good little CEO does. Enjoy your piles of money, fuckheads.