10 Recent Video Games That Were Too Big To Fail (That Did Anyway)
"How to ruin some of the best games of all time", by Rockstar Games. #GTA #rockstar #wtf
Transcript
00:00 Too big to fail is a term generally reserved for large financial institutions, the failure
00:05 of which would result in catastrophic economic strife, and so they're continually bailed
00:10 out by the government to prevent wider systemic collapse.
00:13 In the world of video games it's thankfully not quite so dire, though there is nevertheless
00:17 a clear feeling of hubris among some game publishers that their releases are such commercial
00:21 juggernauts that nothing they do could possibly derail the gravy train.
00:25 Yet in a time where gamers are more empowered than ever, keenly raking publishers over the
00:29 coals for their poor conduct, it's safe to say that even the safest bet is no longer
00:34 completely safe.
00:35 While these ten video games all seemed like absolute slam dunk projects, each also flamed
00:40 out as critical and consumer goodwill ran dry, leaving them with dented metacritic scores
00:45 and worst of all, ill-stocked coffers.
00:47 Though each of these games seemed like critical and commercial smash hits on paper, and that
00:51 they were simply too big to fail, each ended up falling flat, in one way or another, if
00:56 not both.
00:57 I'm Si for WhatCulture.com and these are 10 Recent Video Games That Were Too Big To
01:02 Fail That Did Anyway.
01:04 10.
01:05 Battlefield 2042
01:06 The Battlefield franchise is one of the premier first-person shooter behemoths.
01:09 It's been around for two decades and, despite its ups and downs, has endured as a huge-scale
01:14 alternative to the crowned king of the FPS, Call of Duty, which we'll be discussing
01:19 later.
01:20 The prospect of any Battlefield game being bad enough to turn off players en masse just
01:24 seemed inconceivable, especially with every new release now available as part of the EA
01:29 Play Pro subscription service for a much lower entry fee.
01:32 Compounding the rocky launches of the last few Battlefield games, last year's Battlefield
01:37 2042 released in a state which players and critics alike agreed was 'unfinished'.
01:42 Between the depressing lack of expected features and embarrassing overabundance of bugs, the
01:46 general feeling was that EA rushed the game out to meet a deadline, confident that it
01:50 would still sell well enough regardless.
01:52 2042's release has dealt possibly irreparable damage to the Battlefield brand, with the
01:57 game receiving over 30,000 negative reviews on Steam within two days of its release, while
02:01 a petition for refunds has been signed by more than 230,000 people.
02:06 But the real impact is reflected commercially.
02:08 Sales were so disappointing out of the gate that EA refused to disclose them, and less
02:12 than five months after its release, the concurrent player count has already dipped below 1,000.
02:17 Though EA and DICE are continuing to patch the game into slightly better shape, it's
02:21 clear that many fans feel burned enough by the franchise that they may not return for
02:25 the next instalment.
02:27 9.
02:28 Marvel's Avengers
02:29 The Marvel Cinematic Universe is one of the most lucrative entertainment franchises on
02:33 the planet, and so the prospect of an Avengers-themed action RPG developed by Crystal Dynamics of
02:38 the Tomb Raider fame and published by Square Enix seemed like an absolute slam-dunkaroo.
02:44 There was, admittedly, a healthy amount of pre-release scepticism about the Avengers'
02:48 underwhelming character designs and the possibility that it was ultimately going to be a low-effort
02:53 live-service game, exploiting the Marvel brand for easy microtransaction-driven profits.
02:58 And ultimately, those fears were largely realised as Marvel's Avengers turned out to be a
03:03 generic grindy brawler filled with unimaginative action-adventure gameplay and tired progression
03:08 systems.
03:09 More than anything, though, many complained about the lack of content, which for a live-service
03:13 title was basically the kiss of death.
03:15 Within two months of Avengers' release, the player count on Steam had dropped by 96%,
03:19 while sales also quickly fell off a cliff after a strong start, causing a stonking $63
03:25 million in losses for Square Enix.
03:27 Though their subsequent story expansions were broadly well-received, the publisher was raked
03:31 over the coals late last year when they implemented pay-to-win mechanics and a progression-slowing
03:36 patch - the former of which was removed following sustained player vitriol.
03:40 Though Square Enix insists they're continuing to support the game, it's really just a
03:44 matter of time before they quietly put their failed cash cow out to pasture.
03:49 8.
03:50 Godfall
03:51 Godfall was heavily hyped up pre-release as one of the PS5's first major AAA console
03:55 exclusives - a glossy multiplayer looter-slasher published, yet crucially not developed, by
04:00 Bordlands Gearbox Software.
04:03 It certainly looked slick and entertaining from the trailers, even if they failed to
04:06 give much of an impression of the story or more involved gameplay elements.
04:10 Godfall was extremely polarising upon release in large part due to the shocking lack of
04:15 launch content, simplistic combat and generally repetitive gameplay.
04:19 Perhaps its most unforgivable misstep, though, was launching without multiplayer matchmaking,
04:24 meaning that anyone hoping to team up with randoms was totally out of luck.
04:27 For a game that launched for a full-whack RRP of £60, $70, it was an embarrassingly
04:33 lacklustre package and plainly clear that Gearbox shoved it out the front door in the
04:38 hope of snagging some easy new-gen sales.
04:41 The fact that sales data for Godfall is incredibly scarce really says it all.
04:45 Once word got out about the mediocre gameplay and piecemeal amount of content for the asking
04:49 price, it dive-bombed at retail and never recovered.
04:52 The game ended up being quickly discounted and even the recent release of an updated
04:56 Ultimate Edition hasn't managed to breathe much life into a fundamentally failed enterprise.
05:02 7.
05:03 Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Extraction
05:05 The Tom Clancy brand has been one of the gaming industry's indefatigable pillars for almost
05:10 25 years, and though not every single game has been a commercial smash, outright flops
05:15 have been few and far between.
05:16 Or to the point, when Ubisoft announced Rainbow Six Extraction, a sci-fi spin-off from their
05:21 massively successful Rainbow Six Siege, it seemed like it simply couldn't be anything
05:25 less than a modest hit.
05:27 Siege has enjoyed such unexpected longevity since its 2015 launch that the studio seemed
05:32 to have the formula for success nailed down pat.
05:35 Why wouldn't it work for Extraction?
05:37 While the reviews certainly weren't damning, they weren't massively enthusiastic either,
05:42 with most critics broadly praising the general mechanics, but finding little inspiration
05:45 in its generic multiplayer survival gameplay.
05:48 The general consensus is that it was a relatively bland attempt to do something different with
05:52 the Siege formula, and so why would anyone play it instead of Siege?
05:57 Extraction enjoyed strong player engagement out of the gate due to releasing simultaneously
06:01 on Xbox Game Pass, though the community quickly thinned out due to the lack of available content
06:06 and scarcity of updates.
06:07 While Siege continues to regularly tout 50,000+ concurrent players on Steam alone, Extraction
06:13 conversely feels like it's already on life support, and is destined to be forgotten entirely
06:17 by casual players before year's end.
06:20 6.
06:21 Cyberpunk 2077
06:22 CG Project Red is one of the few marquee video game developers whose name alone will shift
06:27 millions of copies of whatever they're making.
06:30 After the success of The Witcher, players have a lot of faith in their ability to deliver
06:34 quality AAA experiences, and Cyberpunk 2077 certainly looked like a surefire smash hit,
06:40 what with its gorgeous art style and expansive, appealing open world.
06:44 How could the people who made The Witcher 3 possibly screw this up?
06:48 Cyberpunk's launch was one of the most dispiritingly bungled of recent years.
06:53 Performance issues were rife across platforms, with console versions in a compromised enough
06:57 state as to be considered borderline unplayable.
07:00 Given that CG Project Red clearly attempted to conceal the non-quality of the console
07:04 versions, millions of players were irate, while even those who were able to play it
07:08 questioned whether the end result justified all those years of hype and development.
07:12 Now in commercial terms, Cyberpunk is undeniably a success.
07:15 It's sold more than 18 million copies to date, but the ding CG Project Red's reputation
07:20 took over its release is massively costly.
07:23 The studio ended up paying a $1.85 million settlement to pissed off investors, which
07:28 while a drop in the ocean given the game's huge sales, was really just the tip of the
07:31 PR iceberg.
07:32 The PS4 version of the game was enough of a mess that Sony voluntarily delisted it from
07:37 PSN for more than 6 months, and refunds were offered by both Sony and Microsoft.
07:42 The ultimate failure of Cyberpunk though, is that very few people are still talking
07:46 about its story or gameplay, but they are still talking about how horribly botched its
07:51 launch was.
07:52 Needless to say, CG Project Red's reputation has been permanently dirtied as a result,
07:57 and their next release is sure to be met with a healthy side order of pre-release skepticism.
08:01 Number 5 - Crucible
08:03 By the end of last year, Amazon was worth $438 billion.
08:08 That is the definition of too big to fail, and so it would certainly be a relief for
08:12 any video game developer to be partnering with such a financially flush publisher.
08:16 2020's free-to-play third-person shooter Crucible was developed by Relentless Studios
08:21 under the Amazon Games Studios Publishing label, and was the commercial goliath's
08:25 first big swing at making a Fortnite-level global gaming phenomenon.
08:29 Given that Amazon owns Twitch, it truly seemed like they had a perfectly fertile environment
08:33 to make Crucible a mammoth success.
08:36 After 6 years in development, Crucible launched in open beta in May 2020, and was immediately
08:41 dogpiled by critics and players alike for its lack of launch content, generic hero shooter
08:46 gameplay, poor matchmaking, frustrating design decisions, and excess of glitches.
08:50 In a multiplayer space that's notoriously difficult to crack, this just wasn't going
08:54 to cut it.
08:55 Crucible went back into closed beta barely a month after launch, and within days its
08:59 concurrent player count dipped below 200, from which it never recovered.
09:04 In October 2020, less than 5 months after the game's original release, Relentless
09:08 Studios announced that Crucible would be imminently shutting down, with Amazon pulling the plug
09:12 on the costly endeavour.
09:14 Let Crucible's death be an important lesson - you can be backed by more money than God,
09:19 and still not make a game that people actually want to play.
09:23 4. Call of Duty Vanguard
09:25 The Call of Duty franchise is, more or less, commercially bulletproof.
09:28 The series to date has sold more than 400 million units, delivering tried and tested
09:33 FPS thrills, where a baseline level of polished entertainment is guaranteed every single time.
09:38 Why would the most recent entry, Call of Duty Vanguard, be any different?
09:42 Especially with it being the franchise's first entry on new-gen consoles.
09:47 Vanguard received the series' most mixed reviews since 2013's Ghosts - ironically
09:51 itself, the first Call of Duty for PS4 and Xbox One - with many complaining about the
09:56 short, over-familiar campaign, frustrating multiplayer time to kill, and perhaps most
10:00 of all, the utterly lacklustre Zombies mode.
10:03 While Call of Duty doesn't fail in the way that most video game franchises do, Vanguard
10:07 still received considerably more sustained vitriol from the fanbase than even more initially
10:12 divisive entries like 2016's Infinite Warfare.
10:15 This prompted many to speculate that the game's development had been severely hampered by
10:18 the pandemic.
10:19 Though Call of Duty sales have been consistently strong, even with fluctuation, Vanguard suffered
10:24 a brutal 40% drop from predecessor Cold War's launch.
10:28 Worse still, this gave it the lowest launch sales for the series since 2007's Call of
10:33 Duty 4 Modern Warfare.
10:35 Analysts pointed to a crowded marketplace, with both Battlefield 2042 and Halo Infinite
10:40 releasing around the same time, but simply the interest among all but the most devout
10:44 fans just wasn't there.
10:46 Why bother shelling out top dollar for a new Call of Duty when you can just keep playing
10:50 the free-to-play Warzone instead?
10:52 The wider impact of Vanguard's underperformance is that Activision recently confirmed that
10:56 there won't be a Call of Duty game released in 2023, marking the first time in 18 years
11:02 that the series won't release an annual title.
11:04 Insiders even directly cited Vanguard's poor sales as the reason.
11:07 At least with Microsoft recently acquiring Activision, sales will become less of a concern,
11:11 as each new title presumably releases day and date on Xbox Game Pass.
11:15 3.
11:16 Madden NFL 21 EA's Madden NFL is quite literally THE
11:21 American football video game franchise, given the lack of competing AAA games for fans of
11:26 the sport.
11:27 Yet, to be fair, Madden NFL has been a supremely consistent series over the last decade or
11:32 so, with the majority of the releases landing 80+ meta scores, and so it seemed that the
11:37 franchise's singular dominance of American football games was absolutely well-deserved.
11:42 But the wheels finally came off with NFL 21, which broke the series' long-standing critical
11:48 winning streak with a meta score of just 63.
11:51 Criticism was largely levelled against the bug-filled gameplay, and EA's refusal to
11:55 provide long-requested updates to franchise mode - enough that #FixMaddenFranchise and
12:00 #NFLDropEA began trending shortly following the game's release.
12:05 Many felt that they were simply paying money for a roster update, and little else given
12:09 how few worthwhile changes NFL 21 made to the prior entry.
12:13 The PR hit was significant, with various hashtags trending enough to receive mainstream media
12:19 coverage, all while fans continued to campaign for the NFL to take their license to another
12:23 publisher.
12:24 The game sold well regardless, yet EA did at least appear to listen to the vocal criticism,
12:28 as last year's NFL 22 received more broadly positive reviews, with many noting its massively
12:33 improved franchise mode.
12:35 This is a rare example of a failed game actually bringing about meaningful change, even if
12:39 there's still much more work to be done.
12:41 2.
12:42 Grand Theft Auto The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition
12:45 Rockstar's achievements in the mega-budget AAA gaming sphere are basically unparalleled.
12:50 They've never put out a blockbuster dud, so how could they possibly screw up a remaster
12:55 trilogy of GTA 3, Vice City and San Andreas?
12:59 Taking three of the most beloved games of all time and slapping a new coat of paint
13:02 on them, possibly with a few quality of life fixes, should have been the easiest money
13:06 and acclaim they ever got.
13:08 Somehow they screwed up the unscrupable.
13:10 Rockstar's big mistake was outsourcing the project to the evidently ill-equipped
13:15 outfit Grove Street Games, who simply weren't a calibre developer to take on a project of
13:20 this scale or remaster games this beloved.
13:23 After a suspiciously quiet marketing push, the games were released to an utterly baffled
13:27 fanbase, perplexed that the remasters were evidently rushed, thrown together messes full
13:31 of technical jank and questionable stylistic choices.
13:35 Despite Rockstar initially stating that the trilogy sold above expectations, stock analysts
13:39 insist it underperformed, but worse than that it dealt quite the blow to Rockstar's own
13:44 reputation.
13:45 In many respects, this was Rockstar's first high-profile dud release, and a firm reminder
13:49 that even the hallowed titans of the industry aren't beyond a colossal screw-up.
13:53 While it's not exactly getting many people less hyped for GTA 6, it did prove that Rockstar
13:57 isn't above shoveling s*** out the door in pursuit of an easy, nostalgia-fuelled payday.
14:02 Number 1 - Far Cry 6
14:05 By the time a video game franchise makes it to six mainline instalments, it's reasonable
14:09 to assume they've found the secret sauce that keeps players coming back for more.
14:13 And that's certainly seemed true of Far Cry, what with 2018's fifth game becoming
14:17 the fastest-selling entry in the series, grossing a stonking $310 million in a single week.
14:23 Why expect anything different for Far Cry 6 then?
14:26 Every franchise has its fatigue point, and with its six main game, Far Cry finally got
14:31 there.
14:32 The reason, of course, that Far Cry 6 was a totally pedestrian entry into the series,
14:36 failing to offer much in the way of creative innovation and largely just rehashing the
14:40 same prevailing formula yet again.
14:42 With a forgettable story to boot that totally wasted the great Giancarlo Esposito as antagonist
14:47 Anton Castillo, this was the franchise at its most wheelspinningly uninspired.
14:52 Far Cry 6 launched to just 50% of its predecessor's digital sales in the UK, and the game's
14:57 general commercial underperformance caused Ubisoft's stock price to drop to its lowest
15:01 point in over four years.
15:03 Though it's incredibly unlikely that Far Cry 7 won't be released within the next
15:07 few years, hopefully Ubisoft might take a little time to regroup and consider a new
15:12 direction for the series.
15:13 (Outro)