Games that publishers pushed out the door onto the shelves even though they weren’t ready yet or never were going to be.
The strongest example I can think of is Everybody 1-2-Switch!, a game that famously was long-rumored to have tested horribly internally and they just decided to stealth release it a couple years after it was ready.
At least you can technically still play this one if you want to. I wonder if anyone ever got a 100 player game together.
Some other lesser examples are the multiplayer shooters LawBreakers, Battleborn and Concord, each of which ended support pretty much immediately after they were released.
The Shining Force 1 remake for GBA sort of felt like this to me. Like I think people at Sega just never liked that franchise for some reason and when Camelot got sick of them and left because of the handling of Shining Force 3 (which is probably another game that qualifies for this thread), Sega needed to think of what to do with it.
So they put out this remake in limited quantities with minimal marketing so they could point and say ‘see, nobody cares’ and rebrand the series as the Tony Taka Waifu Action games.
I don’t know if it was sent out to die as much as it was delayed forever and simply not good, but Nosferatu for the SNES is what jumped to mind. Teased in magazines years before its eventual release, I actually assumed it was cancelled for years as I was waiting for it to finally come out as a horror themed Prince of Persia seemed neat and it never appeared in store or magazine again aside from those old ads in the back of said magazines that eternally listed it as coming soon. Turns out it was at one point released (apparently more or less against the Playstation) in very limited quantities, which was probably the right idea as it was not good at all.
In an interview the CEO of NIS America said they’d agreed to localize Last Rebellion before seeing the actual game, and once they had they cancelled all marketing and revised their policy of automatically picking up all NIS published games.
Sony’s launch of Demon’s Souls as well as the other PS3 games with an English release only available in HK/Singapore like Aquanaut’s Holiday and Toro Let’s Party
I worked on a couple games where they went live, the company realized that user acquisition was way more expensive than they realized, they tried for a couple weeks to see if the game would get some sort of virality, and when it didn’t, they shut everything down. Between the two games I think there was $50m in development for like, a bit over a month uptime combined. Facebook games were a real wild time.
On Concord, I find it particularly funny that it got caught in culture wars bullshit because it’s obvious to everyone who looks at the bigger picture that it was never meant to be something big.
every live service game is this. no one wants one of these games to be ‘sustainable,’ if you wanted sustainable you’d just make regular games. it’s die or yacht in monaco, that’s the business model.
