For its 30th Anniversary Magic the Gathering hyped up the return of $1000 card packs with the CHANCE of pulling non legal reprints of its original Alpha set, including the covered Black Lotus, that is....again....not legally playable in any format and is worth the same as a lotus you get from your home printer. For $1000.

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For the 25th anniversary of Super Mario Bros, Nintendo released Super Mario All Stars for the Wii. It was just an emulation of the SNES game from years before. It was released for $30 even though you could buy all of the original games on the Wii shop for like $21 total. It just reeked of "We know you've already bought these games like 4 times, but please buy them again". They did do a better job on the 35th anniversary though.

Morrowind, which in 20th aniversary of Skyrim aniversary edition released

Fire Emblem delayed their 30th anniversary game by two years. It sat, completed, on the shelf with no real proper explanation as to why. Instead they did a temporary release of the original 8-bit version of the first Fire Emblem on the eShop, when a superior version in essentially every way is available on the DS. If all they were going to do was release an original game on the eShop, the least they could have done was do a worldwide release of one of the games in the series that's still stuck in Japan. Then the actual anniversary game (Engage) finally released two years later, and... it's mid. Not bad, especially gameplay wise, but held back by a laughably cartoonish story, especially compared to its predecessor Three Houses. The mobile game Heroes has some better stories than Engage.

Elder Scrolls Online just is wrapping up it's 10th anniversary event, and it's been pretty underwhelming. They basically did what they do for every event, and made it about farming rewards only on specific activities that result in people grinding mindlessly, and too many people congregating on the same things, which causes bugs and issues so many players don't even get rewards.

I barely partake in ESO events anymore. They're copy/paste, and hardly any fun. And your reward is often the 10 billionth style you won't use anyways, but everyone has FOMO so they go nuts.

I would have much preferred unique quest lines revisiting past incidents, stories, characters. Especially if the game detected how long you've played and how much content you've cleared and sorta systematically gave you a somewhat tailored event to go down memory lane. Or if it had been more broad and not specific to small parts of the game world or specific activities. The only broadly applied stuff were endless loot boxes that get old.

Just felt very meh.

Genshin Impact's first anniversary was the most horrendous one I've seen.

They couldn't even bother to send out an in-game message to congratulate the players.

What they did instead is paying thousands of dollars for Twitter emojis and dishing out a few give-away events where you had to practically advertise for the game to enter. Were you guaranteed to get any reward? No.

Essentially, instead of even acknowledging the anniversary, they made players advertise their game.

They were also supposed to introduce a paid bundle with some cosmetic items alongside a free concert stream (the concert was pretty good). But that was after the anniversary. Keep the bundle in mind, however.

What did it lead to?

• Thousands of outraged players flooded social media.
• Their discord was spammed with "qiqi fallen" emote (one of the characters laying on her back with a blank stare).
• Review bombing got to the point where even Google Classrooms became one of the casualties

I'm probably missing some other details, but this lasted for weeks.

After a long while of non-communication, the devs gave in and finally decided to give players something. This "something" turned out to be the bundle that was supposed to be paid content alongside some (read "very little") in-game resources. There was also another another giveaway event with, this time, guaranteed rewards. The rewards were, practically, you either get a scooter or one cent. Needless to say, it left a sour taste afterward.

Honestly, it felt like a slap in the face, but it was enough for the things to start calming down.

So far, even though they're still very stingy with any sort of rewards, they at least make sure to congratulate the players somehow and give something.

Destiny 2. They made it a paid dlc with a really boring activity and turned a really cool mysterious character into a marvel one liner