Tips Clear News Portal Your Ultimate Guide to Clear Tips on Life, Tech, Health, and More If you like video games, which I wish you, and you were born around the same time as me, which I wish you even more, talking about the most bitter failures in the history of video games will make you probably leading a few big names in the industry. With today’s consoles, studios can bring their works back to life following a failed video game launch, as was the case with Cyberpunk 2077, No Man’s Sky or Star Wars Battlefront 2 who managed to rise from their ashes, but here we are going to talk about the really messed up stuff that never took.
1. Babylon’s Fall
When launching your game there are only 1000 people on the platform Steam to play it gives a rather bad tendency. When players, testers, press and streamers are unanimous on the failure that the game represents, it confirms the trend. But when the studio announces the closure of the servers less than a year after the launch, when the video game brands give free copies to customers and destroy others before throwing them in the trash… There you find yourself faced with one of the biggest failures in video game history.
2. All Points Bulletin
On paper the game was rather promising: the creator of the GTA license himself who announced that he was making his own multiplayer game, former members of the firm who helped with development, a budget of more than 100 million dollars… Except that there had a big hitch: the publisher forbade video game sites to give their opinions until a week AFTER the release of the software, which never happens and is not at all a good sign. It canceled a lot of pre-orders and hurt sales for the first few weeks, not to mention that in the end the game was not crazy at all and especially not up to the tidal wave. GTA V (released three years later it must be admitted). But it was a huge failure for a lot of disappointed people.
3. ET the extraterrestrial
This game released on the Atari 2600 and inspired by Steven Spielberg’s eponymous film is probably one of the biggest scandals in the world of video games. The stuff was horrible, developed in just 5 weeks so that sales could ride on the success of the movie that had just been released. Result we published nearly 5 million copies of the game for 1.5 sold, including a package returned to stores by dissatisfied players. The game was partly responsible for the sinking of Atari and an old legend says that the unsold copies were buried in a desert in New Mexico so that no trace could be kept. I’m not even kidding, he’s a real legend.
4. Anthem
When we know that in full development the studio had given a code name to the game which meant that after him the world of video games would never be the same again, we can say to ourselves that it was a real failure, probably the one of the most outstanding in the middle of the last fifteen years. Be aware, however, that when the first gameplay video was released, the development of the game had barely started, the developers had been requisitioned to work mainly on the video… Too bad, it was promising, but the players deserted the game quickly in the face of the cruel lack of activities. Good gameplay isn’t everything.
5. Duke Nukem Forever
The fourth installment of a flagship series from the 90s is long overdue. Long time. Originally planned for the end of 1997, the game was finally released 13 years later in 2011, placing itself at the top of the list of the most delayed games in history. And as much to tell you that if you make the fans wait 13 years, you had better get them something irreproachable and up to their expectations, which is the complete opposite of what Duke Nukem Forever which appalled the fans. At the same time, things got off to a bad start, 13 years late on the one hand, but above all no less than four studios who worked on the game in turn before handing the project over to someone else, that gave a something with no real identity that suffered 30 million dollars in losses.
6. eFootball 2022
Younger people may not know it, but there was a time when PES was more fashionable than FIFA. The two football games fought each other every year until FIFA finally managed to take the advantage over the other. To try to thwart this domination, the saga became in 2021 eFootball, a sort of online version of the game. And there, it’s the drama, the graphics and the animations of the faces would give nightmares to the most creepy serial killers. Even the developers apologized, that’s to tell you if it’s not a mess.
7. Too Humans
You may have forgotten his name, but the game was supposed to be the killer outcast of the Xbox 360 with huge hype from all the press. When the demo was released, it had logged more playtime in a week than GTA 4 itself, which is clearly a feat, especially for a simple demo. The first problem came from rumors that development was starting to fizzle out after the demo was completed, and then the final version was released to get slain by critics. The game flopped, the studio took a lawsuit and then sank into oblivion before going completely bankrupt in 2014.
8. Ghost Recon Breakpoint
When a game sold for 69 euros finds itself at half price on sales platforms barely three months after its release, it smells a bit like fir. The game got destroyed, literally destroyed by players on the forums. Requests for refunds, catastrophic reviews… The game was not only a tasteless copy of the previous opus, but above all it was literally full of bugs for a good while after its release, which infuriated the players and who is widely felt on sales.
9. Assassin’s Creed : Syndicate
The flagship license of the Ubi-Soft studio took a big hit on the face of the release of Assassin’s Creed : Syndicate and for good reason: the game was horribly buggy, brought no real novelty and especially arrived after THE GAME which had redefined the open-worlds: The Witcher 3. Next, the episode of AC looked like an old game with past mechanics looking like deja vu. Another problem: the game arrived a year after the release of the previous installment (Unity) which had garnered many criticisms because of the massive bugs which prevented from playing correctly, the players had therefore yelled rightly since the studio had not even not tried not to reproduce the same error.
10. Marvel Avengers
In barely 6 or 7 years the world of video games has been invaded by a new genre: “game as service”. The concept is quite simple: you buy a game and it continues to grow over several years by adding paid content that is supposed to keep you interested for as long as possible. Many have broken their necks on this format and the (yet promising) game Avengers was no exception. Repetitive, disappointing, sorely lacking in variety in the fights and enemies, tiring redundancy and the sluggish price of additional content… The game did not really find its audience on release and dropped in price very quickly, forcing the studio to -even recognize a bitter failure.