No matter how we approach it, video games are business, and business means making money. Every big publisher not-so-secretly wants their market share, ideally in the form of a constantly popular “super game,” something akin to a money-printing machine that ensures steady cash flow. While the market is long dominated by ever-popular titans like Call of Duty, CS: GO, Fortnite, Battlefield, Dota 2, League of Legends, Destiny 2, Valorant, PUBG, GTA Online, Apex Legends, and others, it's not unusual for massive new hits to emerge. Just look at ARC Raiders as one of the most recent examples.
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More often than not, though, it's incredibly hard to gain a steady audience in this oversaturated landscape, and even more so with each passing year. Gigantic investments, bold swings, and large, experienced teams cannot guarantee success anymore, and the number of failed attempts just keeps growing. Sometimes an ambitious game that spent years in development gets canceled before seeing the light of day, while others make it to launch… only to be forgotten in mere months or even weeks. Below are the biggest examples of games poised to be the next big thing, only to fail miserably in their quests to fulfill that.
Concord
A Failure For The Ages
Let's start with the game that all but became synonymous with unprecedented high-profile failure in gaming. Following Sony's long-discussed shift in focus to the live-service model (it even bought Bungie specifically for it), Concord released as the first attempt at that, serving as a classic multiplayer hero shooter that players were supposed to enjoy for years. The project was in development at Firewalk Studios for several years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce, and its results are still analyzed to this day.
Released in August 2024, Concord experienced extremely low sales and player numbers from day 1, leaving Sony with no choice but to shut it down just two weeks after launch, pretending it never even happened. All copies sold were refunded, Firewalk Studios was closed, and Sony reportedly canceled numerous other live-service projects that had long been in development – an unfortunate price to pay for a misstep on such a scale.
Hyenas
Join The Pack Of High-Profile Puffs
The truth is, Concord should never have seen the light of day in the first place, as games like this typically get canceled quietly and never released. Take Hyenas, for instance. Sega's “super game,” meant to take a bite of the live-service shooter pie, had been in development at Creative Assembly for a long time, only to be ultimately canceled in September 2023, as the publisher cited low potential for profitability. It really seemed like a bullet dodged.
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The buzz surrounding Hyenas was pretty negative right from the start. Players largely criticized the game's specific character design and an overall lack of direction, similar to criticisms of Concord. It just seemed like yet another “add it to the pile” multiplayer. Hyenas also serves as a clear example of how many publishers tend to choose unsuitable developers for such a job (see Anthem or Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League), with teams that had never worked on anything like a live-service shooter before and lacked the experience to compete with the market giants being thrown into the fire on an executive whim.
LawBreakers
But Can It Break Even?
However, expertise doesn't guarantee anything. Take LawBreakers, an explosive old-school FPS developed by Boss Key Productions, a new studio founded by former Epic Games veterans Cliff Bleszinski and Arjan Brussee. Coming from Gears of War and Unreal Tournament, both multiplayer juggernauts. Surely these guys know how to make and sell the next big thing, right?
Released in August 2017, LawBreakers definitely had a vision, but it never managed to gather an audience, selling extremely poorly and being discussed by virtually no one in the weeks that followed its launch. While the team attempted a shift to a free-to-play model, it was seemingly too little too late. No one wanted to play LawBreakers anymore. The game was shut down after just a year, and the saddest part is that Boss Key Productions went down as well, despite taking a second shot with Radical Heights – a quicker, cheaper swing at the battle royale genre that failed spectacularly, too.
Battleborn
A Battle Was Indeed Involved - One It Did Not Survive
At times, a game can come really close to success, only to be dethroned almost instantly. Battleborn is all about that. A hero shooter with MOBA elements, Battleborn released in May 2016 to moderate success, and might even have managed to establish itself if the fates had aligned, but there was a big rising star in the way: Overwatch, Blizzard's hero shooter done right, released just a few weeks later.
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Unsurprisingly, many Battleborn players switched to Overwatch, whose popularity exploded, and Gearbox's attempts to keep Battleborn afloat with a reduced price and new DLC weren't enough to even the unfavorable odds. Battleborn remained playable for some time, but it never really managed to capture a real spark. The game was eventually pulled from storefronts in November 2019, fully shutting down by early 2020.
Hyper Scape
Maybe It's About Setting Trends Rather Than Chasing Them?
Ubisoft has quite a history with troubled live-service titles that try and fail to make a splash. While constantly chasing more successful trends in multiplayer live-service games, Hyper Scape, a free-to-play battle royale FPS, saw Ubisoft actually try something new, betting heavily on the game's revolutionary Twitch integrations. However, the concept designed around the idea of “game as a spectacle” wasn't as groundbreaking as the studio probably hoped.
Launched in July 2020 (beta), Hyper Scape had a pretty atypical debut for such a big project, almost instantly going from one of the most viewed games on Twitch to suffering incredibly small player and viewer numbers after the full launch in August. To Ubisoft's credit, as with many of the company's troubled projects that failed to gather an audience, after acknowledging that Hyper Scape did not meet expectations, some attempts to overhaul the title were made over the following months (including gunplay balance plus extra modes), before the game was shut down two years later in 2022.
Marvel's Avengers
Failed To Fully Assemble
Coming during a time when superhero popularity on the big screen was through the roof, it was easy to expect Marvel's Avengers to become a hit game for many years, as fans would pay for exclusive skins, receive new beloved characters down the line, and get huge expansions to continue the story, almost like Marvel Rivals. However, Marvel's Avengers ended up as a pretty inconsistent mix of a cinematic story campaign and shallow live-service elements, including its widely criticized grind with little enemy and boss variety, which is often enough to put off even the most die-hard Iron Man fans.
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Severely lacking in reasons to continue playing after the main story, Marvel's Avengers received several additions, but it was never enough to keep players consistently engaged. The game's support lasted for three years – not great, not terrible. At least it was a better swing than the more recent Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, a similar offering from WB Games aimed at DC fans with seemingly no lessons learned. Needless to say, Kill the Justice League failed even more miserably than Marvel's Avengers, with just under a year of content updates before the creators decided to pull the plug and forget it like a bad dream.
Anthem
Dylan Definitely Wasn't Proud
For years, Anthem has served as a textbook example of a disappointing live-service game launch. Envisioned as a decade-long journey to rival Destiny 2, Anthem (codename: Dylan) wasn't without potential, boasting a unique world and the rich lore expected from a BioWare project, coupled with breathtaking flights in Javelin suits – arguably the best part of the game. Anthem launched in 2019 with a noticeable lack of content (players could do everything in less than 30 hours), but with tremendous expectations from EA. Suffice it to say, despite strong initial sales, the game was plagued with technical issues and other annoying limitations, and players quickly bounced off.
In an attempt to address Anthem's problems, BioWare announced that the team would reinvent the core gameplay as part of a long-term plan, but it seems there actually was no plan. Disappointed in a project that became a constant punchbag in its niche, two years later EA announced that Anthem 2.0 would not be a thing, marking the end of the line for every fan who still hoped for better. The game's servers are to be shut down in January 2026.
Evolve
It Almost Got It Right
Evolve was an interesting project from the people behind the Left 4 Dead games, boasting a unique asymmetrical 4v1 multiplayer, strong visuals, and an original concept with playable monsters taking on 4-player squads of soldiers. Released by Turtle Rock Studios in February 2015, Evolve was fun and seemingly had everything it needed to take its niche, although its progression system and harsh monetization definitely needed work. These short-sighted problems, coupled with a confusing DLC model, contributed greatly to its player base quickly dwindling, setting Evolve on the path toward oblivion.
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Later, the title was relaunched as the free-to-play Evolve Stage 2 project, briefly enjoying a surge of popularity and drawing in millions of players. However, that did not help for long due to a small support team that could not provide new content regularly. Just three years after launch, in September 2018, the game's dedicated servers were shut down for good.
Crucible
The First One Is Always A Dud
An ambitious hero shooter that spent years in development at Relentless Studios, Crucible was Amazon's first major original gaming title, so expectations were pretty high, even though the market for hero shooters was already oversaturated by the time of its release. Launched in May 2020, the team chose a “pre-season” model to allow for fine-tuning of any potential issues, but there were too many. From unoriginal gameplay to technical problems and poor balance, there were not enough reasons to play Crucible over just about anything else available.
Just four months after launch, it was apparent that Crucible had made zero impact. It was announced that the game would be canceled under the vague “inability to see a sustained future” reasoning. At least the devs joined the large team for the upcoming New World MMO, which ended up as one of the most successful Amazon original gaming titles that is still remembered and played.
XDefiant
Still Better Than Black Ops 7
Another Ubisoft attempt at a high-profile F2P multiplayer shooter, XDefiant was instantly met with skepticism for its unclear positioning, seemingly stuck somewhere in the middle of fun arcade-style games and serious tactical shooters (though, this doesn't stop CoD anymore). Released in May 2024, the initial reception for XDefiant was pretty strong. The game amassed its first million players very quickly, even amid the hard times the company had already been going through.
However, things started to fall apart really quickly from there. After the initial surge in popularity, the player base dwindled to below 20,000 across all platforms, and XDefiant reportedly saw little to no revenue from microtransactions. Not even six months had passed before the company announced that XDefiant would be shut down, closing new player registrations in December 2024. The final update to the game after Season 3 did not do much to reverse the decline, either. Fans were left to enjoy XDefiant for another half year, with the game fully shutting down and going offline in June 2025. By that time, too few players even cared.
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