10 REAL Reasons Why These Video Games Failed

Overworking, under-planning, and good old fashioned hubris.

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[eddmario]

Just FYI, the thing with E.T. only having a couple weeks of development wasn't on Atari but Spielberg himself.
He wanted the game to come out in time for the movie. The game itself was also done by a single person, who at the time was Atari's best programmer.

[sevenlexar]

You'd think the heads at EA would catch on after a while that every time they stick their grubby mitts into a games development, and alter things, that it makes the game fail. But no, they keep doing it. And it keeps killing studios. Sigh.

[asteriondeltoro]

Sonic X-treme. It was supposed to be a Sonic the Hedgehog game for the Sega Saturn, but it wound up getting cancelled because one of the main designers NEARLY FREAKING DIED from overwork.

Another jaw-dropping story is the Commodore 64 port of Rainbow Islands, which had to be cancelled because the main coder got into a nasty divorce fight. During which his soon-to-be-ex-wife deleted the game files and smashed up his computer in a fit of malicious spite.

[andykegs]

How can Battleborn be a rip-off of Overwatch when it was released like 3 weeks earlier?
Never played Overwatch but really enjoyed Battleborn, it’s a shame what happened to it.

[kevineads]

Weird people label Battleborn as an Overwatch clone when it came out 3 weeks before Overwatch did.

[barber]

Battleborn was a good game had a story and the multiplayer was Lane based . People compared it to overwatch and jumped on the blizzard hype train so it died off. But they were different games entirely

[adampoole]

You forgot to mention that Activision released what was basically a demo for pro skater 5 and it's day 1 "patch" was the entire game

[antonsanders]

Prey is pretty fucking neat. There's nothing wrong with it beyond name recognition confusion.

[hxctalent]

Don't forget: Companies in the process of buying each other out (The Disney Merger), refusing to buy/renew licenses, and "trying out a new aesthetic": Capcom with Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite

[cristianshadows]

Frostbite was the reason of NFS downhill popularity too. Clipping everywhere, cardboard like texture in terrain, unrecognizable vehicles from afar going at 400 km/h; an engine for FPS would have never worked with a racing game, and somehow they made it work with Heat by an extension, but you can tell it's the engine's fault when the one of the few games considered good after the PS2 era is NFS:HP 2010, a game using the very underrated Chameleon engine made by Criterion, discarded by EA not long after that game

[tubebammy]

It’s absolutely funny now because I remember when Anthem was announced at like E3 2018 or something. I was soooo hyped for that game. I was constantly rewatching the trailers because it just looked like an absolute masterpiece and I was ready to pour hours into that game…….. and then I realized that EA had a hand somewhere in that title and my hype went from 100 to 0 so damn fast smh. EA ruins everything they touch.

[TrueGraveHeart]

Prey was an awesome game, reboot or not. After recently replaying Mass Effect Andromeda I've come to the conclusion that it's not a bad game after all the fixes have been implemented. Sure the story and character diversity is lacking but overall it turned out to be quite enjoyable, at least to me

[MishraArtificer]

Obsidian was given less than a year by LucasArts to make KOTOR II, and weren't even allowed to play the first game before development began. Considering that, it's amazing how well the game played at launch.

[savage]

Battleborn actually came out before overwatch….only by like 2 or 3 weeks but still before

[heidistokes]

I love andromeda, I feel like the general public judged it over harshly because they were comparing it too much to the original trilogy instead of seeing it as its own stand alone title in the same universe. OK, it had teething problems but most of those early issues were patched within a couple weeks

[dieyng]

Interesting concept for failure you must have going there. Neither KOTOR II nor Prey were failures.
In fact, it speaks for the quality of Obsidian's work, that the game is so beloved and modders spent so much time on it, DESPITE the flaws and missing content.
Prey also was a much lauded and successful game, I've never heard it called a failure anywhere but here.

Cyberpunk, I'll give you, but financially it was still a huge success.
As for Mass Effect Andromeda, how could the Frostbyte Engine be the cause of the game's failure, when Dragon Age was successful and critically acclaimed, while being created on the same engine.

[davidmylchreest]

The studio wanted KOTOR2 to be released a year after the first. Bioware said no, and new studio Obsidian stepped in. For their first game it was still impressive.

[VideoGameGlass]

Grounded is a game preview game, meaning it's not finished because it's still being made.

[demnchild]

When I first played dead space back when it came out I was in love I knew nothing about it and don't really care for horror games it was just the perfect blend of everything but what's goes up eventually has to come down

[sophiathekitty]

Destiny's monitization... Specifically the way they were doing the dlc for the first game put me off spending money on the games forever.... Like losing access to end game content I'd been able to play before the latest dlc was a pretty major deal breaker.... And then when I got taken king a few months late and the taken war reskin of the wolf pack special targets were miserable to do when nobody else was doing them... Like they were fun events in the buildup to house of wolves and everybody was doing them...

And while the second one has fixed a lot of those issues.... The core issue of "if I don't buy the dlc/season pass the day it drops and commit to playing the game I'm wasting my money." So I just go and play the new free stuff and get bored... Like maybe if I could always do the nightfalls that might give mea bit more to do.... Though also.... I'm kinda bored of all the strikes and I haven't played the ones for witch queen yet.... I'm just not sure that I'm up to play through the old ones a bunch of times in hopes that I'll get to see a new one.... And even the beyond dark strike that I didn't remember was kinda

Really.... If I could get the way shooting feels in destiny.... The generous aim assist and ammo system.... In a borderlands game or whatever that would be awesome. (Borderlands games take way too long to deliver on the promise of fun... Takes too long to get decent guns... There's never enough of the ammo I use while I'm buried in ammo I don't use.... And I've never unlocked all of the gun equip slots... And I keep having to stop and grind up my level because the game doesn't include a difficulty option even though it's level mechanics would make adding this feature trivial for the developers...)

Liked I'm not asking that borderlands be made as aggressively easy as destiny.... I don't know that I need the enemies to be blatantly trying to get in front of But it would be nice if I could play the sniper character as a sniper.... Like I shouldn't have to run into the middle of the area to get the next wave of enemies to spawn.... The game shouldn't force close combat on me if it's giving me the option of paying as a sniper character.... (And the guns are the best argument against procedural generation I've seen in recent memory)