Top 30 Biggest Video Game Fails of the Decade

The decision to pull the plug on the original “Overwatch” was a choice many players still hang over Blizzard’s head today. The least Blizzard could have done for “Overwatch 2” was deliver a couple of new maps with a smooth launch. Alas, that was not the case. “Overwatch 2” launched with players being stuck in a queue for hours upon hours on end. Those who managed to get in at launch quickly discovered how meaningless this sequel truly was. Just about every map from the previous game was back with nothing new outside of lighting. As soon as Blizzard canceled their plans for story content, fans have begun turning their backs to a company they once adored.

A new 3D platformer from the co-creator of “Sonic the Hedgehog”. That sentence alone should perk anyone’s ears up, but by the time “Balan Wonderworld” launched, the writing was on the wall. What could have been a fun and quirky game themed around musical theater turned into the video game form of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark”. Not only was the game a technical mess, it was overly simplified for a 3D platformer as it dedicated six separate buttons on the controller to ONE function and ONE function only: your costume ability. Yeah, if you were to look up “mundane” in the dictionary, “Balan Wonderworld” would definitely be the example shown.

If you ever needed some kind of a clue as to how bad “Battlefield 2042” was, imagine this: the game launched with no leaderboard. That should be enough to barely scratch the surface. The next hint would just watch all of the compilations of bugs and glitches that cropped up on YouTube at launch. Vehicle physics were completely tanked, online functionality was unstable, and the most trivial actions could possibly launch you to the top of the skybox. To be fair, “Battlefield 2042” has supposedly gotten better at the time of this video. But considering the stellar quality behind previous games like “Battlefield 1”, this should have never been shipped.

Blizzard makes yet another appearance, and we aren’t even a third of the way through this list. “Warcraft III: Reforged” will forever be a humiliating stain on Blizzard’s reputation for a variety of reasons. First, we were told that this remaster would feature new cutscenes that would further enhance the story. Well, that was a bold-faced lie as the cutscenes remained the exact same way as the original “Warcraft III”. Then, there was the EULA agreement that forced users to forfeit all creative ideas and concepts should they use “Warcraft III” to mod in additional game modes. Combine all of that with even more missing features that were advertised initially, and you have the biggest embarrassment in Blizzard’s history…so far.

“Lord of Ring: Gollum” will be forever remembered as one of the worst games ever seen in the 2020’s. It was bad enough that no one had any confidence in this game being remotely decent in the weeks leading up to launch. The thing is that no one expected it to be so bad that a setting for hair physics was removed from the game completely for making the game unstable. No one expected it to be awful enough that you could repeat numerous bugs without fail. No one expected it to be so beyond broken that you could travel outside of the levels! And with a terrible public apology that was [allegedly] written by AI, “Lord of Ring: Gollum” caused way more migraines than it should have.

Unity was once regarded as one of the cheapest game engines to obtain and one of the easiest to use. It opened the door to game development for hundreds of thousands of would-be developers, allowing them to finally fulfill their dreams and put out their first games. Well, in September 2023, Unity decided it wanted more money from small-time devs and announced they would be implementing a new policy that would grant Unity additional royalties from indie devs, royalties based on the number of times a game was downloaded. Everyone hated that. Several indie developers, including some that are prominent in the space, would announce delays or even cancellations of their games as many scrambled to find a new game engine to work with. Unity would not cancel the policy until September 2024, a whole year after the backlash began.

Ever since “Borderlands 2” launched in 2012, Gearbox has continuously failed in reaching that same level of success. Even after the bomb that was “Battleborn”, maybe a new IP could renew the faith from old fans? Not with “Godfall”. In the weeks leading up to launch, Gearbox placed a bizarre emphasis on how good the endgame content is. Okay, but what about the game itself? Well, it was nothing special. “Godfall” was a melee-centric “Borderlands” but with a world coated in lens flares and absurd sheen instead of scrap and flesh…and a better combat system albeit for a few short minutes. So, if the main game loop is boring, what reason is there to stick around long enough for a supposedly fun endgame? That’s like advertising a moldy dinner while promising an exquisite dessert.

So, if “Godfall” is the “bad dinner with a great dessert”, then what does that make “New Tales From the Borderlands”? Imagine being handed the soggiest bag of fast food by a person with the brightest smile on their face. Once again, Gearbox tanks its reputation further by delivering a narrative-driven game with a poorly written story filled with unlikable and annoying characters. It was even more infuriating to witness as Gearbox heavily banked on the nostalgia people have for the original “Tales From the Borderlands”, which was developed by Telltale Games. At some point, maybe we need to start discussing whether “Borderlands 2” was just a flash in the pan for the franchise.

When you’re describing your upcoming game as being “the first quadruple-A game”, that’s a red flag if your game is anything like “Skull and Bones”. After festering within Ubisoft for over a decade, we finally got to see if “Sea of Thieves” was about to have a competitor next door. That idea was extinguished within minutes after launch. Launching in February 2024, “Skull and Bones” turned out to be nothing more than an online open world game with naval combat nowhere near as exciting or complex as “Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag”. In October 2024, insiders leaked information about Ubisoft’s financials, revealing that “Skull and Bones” had a budget between $650 million and $850 million. Those same insiders revealed that the game has been a major reason as to why Ubisoft’s stock and revenue went on a rapid decline throughout 2024.

It’s very easy to label a bad game as a “scam”, but everything surrounding “The Day Before” looks, smells, and tastes like a scam. The marketing was shady from the start with possibly plagiarized trailers, frequent delays, and a strangely hyperactive amount of attention the game was getting for what was essentially an online survival zombie game. It was even more bizarre when accusations of unpaid labor and asset-flipping began to crop up. Once “The Day Before” launched, it was all over. It launched in a horribly unstable state and became the laughingstock of the internet. Developer Fntastic (no, that is not a spelling error) has tried getting a second and third game off the ground to no avail at the time of this video.

For a game that is graphically intense, one might be quick to say that “Mortal Kombat” should maybe not release on a Nintendo console. After all, Nintendo’s consoles aren’t really meant to be powerhouses like the PS5 or Xbox Series X. And yet, Warner Bros had to make it so. Both MK11 and MK1 were the worst ports we had ever seen on Switch with their creepy character models and severely compromised visuals. And can you believe Warner Bros wanted fifty bucks for these abysmal ports?? Supposedly, they’ve gotten a little better over time, but still, why would anyone settle for this?

Speaking of piss-poor work, the GTA PS2 trilogy was done dirty in 2021. With the original games being delisted from all digital storefronts, Rockstar Games was ready to put out this bundle that put some spit and polish on GTA III, “San Andreas”, and “Vice City”. The only problem is there was a ton of spit and no polish. All three games were marred with visual glitches that occurred for weather effects, textures, signage, and even some of the character models. Turns out developer Grove Street Games had used AI to upscale textures only for it to screw up most of them. Rockstar would take another three years to go in and fix the game themselves, releasing a patch in 2024. Grove Street Games had its name completely scrubbed from the credits by Rockstar, which Grove Street’s CEO was not super thrilled over.

Today, “Fallout 76” enjoys a healthy playerbase that genuinely loves the way the game has turned out over the last several years. Time travel to 2018, though, and it was a completely different story. “Fallout 76” launched with an endless sea of problems. Quests bugging out to the point of being unbeatable, connection issues causing cheap deaths, problems rendering objects as the player travelled – it was all a disaster! People were furious, thus giving Bethesda a more negative reputation than it used to have. At least they have managed to turn F76 around today.

Nintendo’s success from the NES and SNES Classic prompted Sony to do the same. Surely, players would want a small digital library of classic PS1 titles? Well as it turns out, if you implement a bunch of aspects players hate, the answer is a resounding no. The mediocre game line-up was an easy criticism pre-launch. But the poor user interface, subpar image and emulation quality, and an insane $100 price tag made the game line-up the least of our worries. Word spread fast, and Sony has gone through several price cuts just to get people to buy them.

Our hearts go out to the developers of “Crackdown 3.” The latest entry of the hectic, third-person shooter series went through 4 delays before finally releasing in February 2019. And they were all products of trying (and failing) to keep the hefty promises the game was supposed to deliver on. Fully destructible environments through the Xbox One’s highly touted Cloud Processing were harder to implement than the team initially thought. The delays, crowded release schedule, and mediocre game design made it sell incredibly poorly. It didn’t actually do much different from the original “Crackdown,” which was released in 2007. It’s such a shame this was a failure given the importance riding on this title.

The first “Metal Gear” game without Hideo Kojima was always going to be met with serious scrutiny. Unfortunately for us, Konami dropped the ball pretty hard. Gone was the focus on stealth gameplay the series was known for. Instead, “Survive” was an action-survival game set in an alternate universe that tasked players with combating zombie-like creatures. If that doesn’t convince you that the tacked on “Metal Gear” name was just a cash grab, the inclusion of microtransactions should. The story and characters, which had nothing to do with the iconic characters players know, were also met with fair criticism. Nevertheless, it underperformed. And it’s a rather sour note as the so-far last installment of such a cherished series.

While the Wii U had some great games, it was almost set up to fail from the very beginning. Revealed at E3 2011, Nintendo focused so heavily on the new controller that many didn’t realize it was an entirely new console. And naming it after the popular Wii to sound like an add-on didn’t help matters. The console would struggle through mediocre third party ports and a trickling of great first party fare for five years. With nothing really new to draw players in, the Wii U was a colossal financial failure for Nintendo. At least this failure has a happy ending: it led to the inventive and imaginative Switch.

Sony’s handheld consoles were always going to be second fiddle to Nintendo’s lineup, but things did well for the Vita at all. From the moment the system launched, sales were very slow, and never had the chance to take off. This was attributed to the fact that there weren’t that many must own exclusives on the system, and it’s multimedia features were being bested by smartphones at the time. Eventually game development for the Vita ended mid-decade, most of its exclusives were ported over to the PS4, and Sony quietly discontinued the Vita in March 2019. Sadly unlike the Wii U, there seems to be no successor to the Vita in sight.

When it comes to Kickstarter campaigns, for every incredible “Shovel Knight,” there are at least 3 like this. “Mighty No. 9” was meant to be a spiritual successor to “Mega Man,” and even came from the blue bomber’s artistic creator, Keiji Inafune. Given the popularity of the Capcom franchise, “Mighty No. 9” blew through all of its financial milestones incredibly quickly. After many delays, it was met with tremendous backlash from both players and critics. Underwhelming graphics, a bland story, and poor technical performance were all favorites to pick apart. Even those who backed the project reported receiving broken download codes and mismatched rewards. An overall mess of a project, it didn’t help that it received one of the worst launch trailers of all time.

When promoting a game, it’s best to keep your promises in check. Hello Games learned this the hard way when they launched “No Man’s Sky” in 2016. Players were ecstatic to explore a procedurally generated galaxy with their friends, discovering new planets and species. A victim of overhype and overselling, the title released without many of the promised functions. Multiplayer components and gameplay elements, such as those in terms of crafting resources and different planetary features, were absent from the game. This obviously sparked outrage from players sold on a certain experience. And this failure to live up to expectations is something Hello Games has had to work very hard to fix with updates to the game. But they’ve learned to stay quiet.

While they were around since 2005, Telltale Games earned fame by creating point-and-click games based on popular IPs. Their most successful being 2012’s “The Walking Dead” where tough choices made for engaging storytelling. But some of the more expensive-costing franchises like “Batman” and “Game of Thrones,” combined with diminishing sales, meant they had to shut their doors in 2018. But the worst part is how they went about it. With little notice, Telltale laid off 250 employees with no severance pay. What remains of the studio was purchased by LCG Entertainment in 2019, but this was an undeniably awful handling of a bad situation.

BioWare’s online sci-fi shooter would probably still make the list for its repetitive grind, generic story, and its failure to meet EA’s selling expectations. But it’s the behind-the-scenes story that makes things so much worse. Shortly after the game’s release, Kotaku’s Jason Schreier interviewed a group of anonymous BioWare employees. And the picture they painted wasn’t pretty. Poor management, crunch, high stress, indecision about what the game should actually be, and a forced usage of EA’s Frostbite game engine all resulted in a half-baked title. “Anthem” is a tedious, unfun mess that doesn’t live up to BioWare’s standards.

Gearbox’s hero shooter is actually an okay game. It had enough variety in each character’s gameplay mechanics to keep players interested. Its failure, however, can mostly be attributed to its launch window. It was released in May of 2016, mere weeks before the much-more-highly-anticipated “Overwatch” from Blizzard. Though they were similar, “Overwatch” was clearly the better game and had the larger marketing budget. “Battleborn” sold decently at launch. But player count dropped immensely after “Overwatch” released, with the PC count dropping from 12,000 to 1,000 just two months later. The game would eventually go free-to-play in 2017, but was shut down in January 2021. So long Battleborn.

With the boom in popularity of battle royale games like “PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds” and “Fortnite,” we’ve seen many studios follow the trend to varying degrees of success. At the very bottom of that list sits “Radical Heights.” Developer Boss Key Productions likely thought the title would help them recuperate losses from their first game, the FPS “LawBreakers.” However, “Radical Heights”, classified as being in “X-Treme Early Access,” was criticized for using unpolished assets and recycling gameplay from more successful counterparts. It was obviously a slapdash combination of things Boss Key thought would bring players in. Instead, it brought financial ruin to the studio as it closed shortly after. Cliff Bleszinski, the studio’s founder and creator of “Gears of War,” even retired after Boss Key’s closure.

Things started going downhill at BioWare before “Anthem.” The fourth (and so far) final entry in the “Mass Effect” series; was built by the company’s Montreal team. Just like with “Anthem” though, Kotaku’s Jason Jason Schreier reported mismanagement issues. Notably that the team was forced to use the Frostbite engine, which required them to build everything from the ground up. Many team members, particularly in leadership positions, would leave BioWare during the difficult production. Upon release, facial animations were a constant source of jokes from players. And a bevy of technical bugs and glitches made it frustrating to play. It was so bad that EA shut down BioWare Montreal as a result of the failure.

Square Enix’s third attempt to break into the live service market required the help of PlatinumGames, famed studio behind “Bayonetta”, “Vanquish”, and “MadWorld”. However, neither studio seemed to be prepared for this endeavor, let alone capable of pulling it off. “Babylon’s Fall” wound up being a game filled with corridors, unremarkable environments, and poorly explained mechanics. The game did not even last a year before it was shut down in February 2023, and it’s part of the reason why some have become more skeptical of PlatinumGames recently.

During the previews and marketing campaign, “Redfall” seemed like it could be a sleeper hit for Xbox. There weren’t a ton of people excited for it, but Arkane Studios had prestige thanks to its efforts on the “Dishonored” games. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. “Redfall” became one of Xbox’s biggest blunders in the brand’s history. Not only did we get a dull open world, we got a world where the AI was insipidly stupid and wouldn’t properly detect or react to the player. The fact players were required to create Bethesda accounts and have an online connection was equally aggravating. In the end, Arkane lost its branch in Austin, Texas, all future plans for “Redfall” were canceled, and the game was preserved by allowing it to function offline.

Before “Babylon’s Fall” came “Marvel’s Avengers”. This should have been an easy win for Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics, but when you have a studio built for single-player games to design an online multiplayer title, things are gonna get ugly. What we got was a game where mashing one button to attack solves almost all of your problems, and the Avengers get to spend much of the game opening boxes for gear. “Marvel’s Avengers” was delisted from digital storefronts as of 2023. Square Enix suffered a massive loss of more than sixty million dollars, leading them to sell Crystal Dynamics to Embracer Group along with the “Tomb Raider” IP.

Yet another sad attempt at a live service, and once again, a publisher had its own single-player game studio make a multiplayer online service title. No one other than Warner Bros wanted an online shooter from Rocksteady. No one was asking for a “Suicide Squad” spin-off from the folks known for the “Batman: Arkham” games. And yet, we somehow got one that was packed with a messy UI, a bland story, and a poor ending that only serves as an excuse for the live service element’s inclusion. “Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League” sold so abysmally that Warner Brothers blamed the game as the reason why they suddenly lost two hundred million. Despite this, Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav insists that WB Games will continue investing into live service games.

Sony may as well have told Warner Bros to hold their beer because “Concord” is the most prolific video game failure we’ve seen since “E.T.” on Atari. Sony burned four hundred million dollars in almost an instant when it saw “Concord” was floundering in development. Not only did they spend two hundred million to acquire Firewalk Studios, they injected two hundred million just for them to finish a standard PvP hero shooter. Players were so uninterested that Sony pulled the game from sale and shut down the servers less than two weeks after launch. Firewalk Studios was shuttered in October 2024. And to think that Sony internally championed this game as “the next Star Wars”.

Did you play any of these failures for yourself? Let us know down in the comments!