Week 1: Promising Failures

Experimenting, progress, failure – these keywords come to my mind when thinking about IT. Over the last few years, we have seen many successful companies become relevant and many great apps rise to the top. But as we know, not all experiments go the way we want. In this week’s blog, I will talk about a few projects that were seemed very promising at first but then failed miserably.

Valve is known in the gaming industry for it’s classic games – Counter-Strike, Half-Life, Portal. It is also the company responsible for the creation of Steam – one of the biggest video game digital distribution services in the world. With such a reputation they also have high expectations to meet. Valve’s card game Artifact did not meet these expectations. Digital card games are not a new phenomenon, games such as Hearthstone, Gwent: The Witcher Card Game, Magic: The Gathering Arena have been very successful in the last few years, so Valve trying to make a similar game seemed like a safe bet. Valve also brought on Magic: The Gathering creator Richard Garfield to design the game and it would be based on the widely popular Dota 2. Despite all of this, the game disappointed the fans already from the reveal. The company had not made any games for a few years and the fans were excited to hear about a new potential title, but when the reveal said it is going to be a card game, the fans were immediately disappointed. Card games are widely known to be filled with micro-transactions and being very pay-to-win, so already a lot of people were put off by this. When the game finally launched the fans were not happy. The game was very complicated to watch and extremely hard to play. Some of the key features presented in other card games were not present and even if you were to master the mechanics there still a lot of flaws in the gameplay. Only a tenth of its initial 60,000 players stuck around two months after the launch, and right now there are only around 60 active players per day.

When we think about smartphones we mostly imagine either an Android or an iOS but in 2010 Microsoft announced a new type of OS for a phone, a Windows Phone. I know a few people who purchased a Windows Phone and really liked it at first but they had to switch their phones a few years later. The whole project started by Microsoft buying a part of Nokia to create the phone. The device was of good quality, ran smoothly and seemed to have a great company behind it. But the fact that it needed it’s own ecosystem to survive, lead to its eventual downfall. For its first three years, the Windows Phone app store was empty. It didn’t have popular apps such as Instagram or YouTube; it barely had anything. By 2013 the stock of Nokia had fallen by 75%. Finally, in October 2017, Windows Phone was pronounced dead.

Speaking of phones, Samsung Galaxy Note 7 is known by many because of its “minor” flaw at launch – simply put, the phones would overheat and catch on fire or explode. August 31st in 2016, it was reported that Samsung was delaying shipments of the Galaxy Note 7 in order to perform “additional tests being conducted for product quality”; this came alongside user reports of batteries exploding while charging. On the– 2nd of September, Samsung stopped selling the Galaxy Note 7 and announced a recall after it was found that a manufacturing defect in the phones’ batteries had caused some of them to generate excessive heat, resulting in fires and explosions. Even after the recall and issuing replacement phones to the customers, there were issues and the issues did not change. The replacement phones still suffered from battery failure and combustion. Finally, Samsung issued a second recall and decided to discontinue the phone at all.

Although these projects were not the most successful, they certainly paved the path for others to evolve. After all, there is no progress without some failures.

Sources:

• “Why Windows Phone Failed — And How They Could’ve Saved It” by Jeremy Dyck
• “Windows Phone was a glorious failure” by Vlad Savov
• “Artifact: What Went Wrong?” by TheZvi
• Artifact Player Count
• “THE 84 BIGGEST FLOPS, FAILS, AND DEAD DREAMS OF THE DECADE IN TECH” by Verge Staff
• “Samsung Galaxy Note 7 recall: Here’s what happens now” by Jessica Dolcourt