5 ms·

List of commercial failures in video games

21 points by luu 7y ago

dmitriid 7y ago
Conker's Bad Fur Day is a brilliant game
- k4ch0w 7y ago
  I had to go read the wiki to verify you comment, I couldn’t believe I saw conkers on there. It was one of my favorite games as a kid. It was brilliant and had so many reference to pop culture. They ended up remaking it on the 360 and it just wasn’t the same. The matrix fight was one of my all time favorites and same with saving private Ryan.
  - dmitriid 7y ago
    The dynamic music changes! The wacky and brilliant enemies! The voice acting! The poop song! And the ending somehow hit me in the gut hard.
Kiro 7y ago
> With fewer than 25,000 units sold, the Gizmondo was named by GamePro as the worst selling handheld console in history.[8] > The Gizmondo was further overshadowed when Swedish press revealed criminal pasts of several executives, causing their resignations including Tiger Telematics CEO Carl Freer. Director of Gizmondo Europe Stefan Eriksson was involved in a Swedish criminal organisation, the "Uppsalamaffian" (the Uppsala mafia).[9] By February 2006, the company was forced into bankruptcy after amassing US$300 million debt, and the Gizmondo stopped production.[10] Weeks thereafter Eriksson crashed a rare Ferrari Enzo driving at 260km/h in California,[11] and was later jailed and subsequently deported for driving under the influence in connection with the crash and other criminal offenses.
- daeken 7y ago
  LGR did a great video on the Gizmondo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dv6UaHZxUys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dv6UaHZxUys
b0rsuk 7y ago
How is Heroes of Might and Magic IV not a commercial failure? The game was rushed, and in the words of its main designer, the AI was lobotomized. They even introduced the infamous Potion of Insurrection a last-minute effort to fix balance, which led to a period of multiplayer hero rushes. Castle bonuses and cost were slashed by something like 50% in the first patch. It had a number of interesting design ideas, but there's no denying it was a raw experience.
- csunbird 7y ago
  HOMM V was also a kind of failure in balance aspect until they fixed it. Do you remember Raise Dead/Resurrection spam and necromancers moving around 10k skeleton archers?
  - b0rsuk 7y ago
    I never got much into H5. To be frank I was disgusted by V's art direction, obnoxious story, and the initiative system was a far cry from the elegant one from IV. But there's no denying H5 did get fixed and plenty of people like it. I heard it favorably compared to H5 and H6 numerous times. It's like Quake 3 which I initially disliked but later learned to appreciate it for what it is. Problems with IV were fundamental, especially AI, the extremely linear campaign with constricted path and a megaton of scripted events. And that's ironic because the main designer wanted it to be "back to strategic roots". Potion of immortality is something not easily solved with a balance patch where you just tweak a few numbers. The 'heroes as units' system is fundamentally hard to balance in a game where heroes grow on logarithmic scale and armies on linear scale. In hindsight it might seem silly to expect hero power progression that remains distinct for hero types and scales perfectly to plus infinity, but that's more less what people expected after huge maps of Heroes3, with caverns which morphed from an extra place to put loot (as initially designed) to a whole second world. It frustrates me to this day, because there are many very interesting design ideas in there. Of course, All the initial games (Heroes I,II, III) were very incremental in design. All creatures from H1 made it to H2, all from H2 made it to H3. It had to change, it had to be re-imagined. If for no other reason that extra permutation of stats and abilities start feeling very same-y when the system doesn't have enough depth. It's easy to spot that, for example, level7 creatures used the 250 life, 30-40ish damage and growth 3/week template with little deviation. Heroes III felt the most template'y and elsewhere I made some very good points that Heroes II had much better design, especially spell balance. The most powerful spells in Heroes III are the first level ones - stuff like haste, slow scales extremely well with army size and you get mass version through an Expert magic skill.
b0rsuk 7y ago
DooM, the first one, was likely a commercial failure. They made the shareware episodes too generous, and plenty of people played them in multiplayer for days. DooM 2 was a map pack with several new monsters and a new weapon, but most importantly it was meant to pay for DooM 1.
- onion2k 7y ago
  If you limit it to just the PC shareware version then perhaps. If you include all the special editions and the ports as part of the same game then there's no way it was a failure. It's been released about 50 times..
- smcl 7y ago
  Failure in the sense that they "left money on the table" so to speak, maybe. But by all accounts even with the generous shareware episode they did extremely well for themselves.
- ido 7y ago
  It still sold a ton (multiple millions of units): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(1993_video_game)#Commercial_and_spreading_performance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(1993_video_game)#Commerc...
Marazan 7y ago
That page describes the PS2 as technically superior to the Dreamcast. Ah yes, all those technically superior jaggy polygons.
- speedgoose 7y ago
  The DVD player was a very good advantage of the PS2.
- tinkthank 7y ago
  I mean, from a technical standpoint the PS2 has higher raw performance numbers: 300MHz vs. 200MHz CPU, 150MHz vs. 100MHz GPU, 32MB vs 16MB RAM, etc. Even factoring architecture differences, those are some large number differences. Of course, what developers actually DO with the added power is another story. Just like some later DC games looked better than early PS2 games, some of the later PS2 games would have been impossible to bring to the DC. And they did manage to eventually find a workaround for the lack of AA on the PS2 with those ugly bloom and "smear" filters. ;)
kalado 7y ago
A lot of games failure names strong competion on release. So if you want to release an indie game, january is recommended.

21 points by luu 7y ago

dmitriid 7y ago

Conker's Bad Fur Day is a brilliant game

k4ch0w 7y ago
I had to go read the wiki to verify you comment, I couldn’t believe I saw conkers on there. It was one of my favorite games as a kid. It was brilliant and had so many reference to pop culture. They ended up remaking it on the 360 and it just wasn’t the same. The matrix fight was one of my all time favorites and same with saving private Ryan.
- dmitriid 7y ago
  The dynamic music changes! The wacky and brilliant enemies! The voice acting! The poop song! And the ending somehow hit me in the gut hard.

Kiro 7y ago

> With fewer than 25,000 units sold, the Gizmondo was named by GamePro as the worst selling handheld console in history.[8] > The Gizmondo was further overshadowed when Swedish press revealed criminal pasts of several executives, causing their resignations including Tiger Telematics CEO Carl Freer. Director of Gizmondo Europe Stefan Eriksson was involved in a Swedish criminal organisation, the "Uppsalamaffian" (the Uppsala mafia).[9] By February 2006, the company was forced into bankruptcy after amassing US$300 million debt, and the Gizmondo stopped production.[10] Weeks thereafter Eriksson crashed a rare Ferrari Enzo driving at 260km/h in California,[11] and was later jailed and subsequently deported for driving under the influence in connection with the crash and other criminal offenses.

daeken 7y ago
LGR did a great video on the Gizmondo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dv6UaHZxUys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dv6UaHZxUys

b0rsuk 7y ago

How is Heroes of Might and Magic IV not a commercial failure? The game was rushed, and in the words of its main designer, the AI was lobotomized. They even introduced the infamous Potion of Insurrection a last-minute effort to fix balance, which led to a period of multiplayer hero rushes. Castle bonuses and cost were slashed by something like 50% in the first patch. It had a number of interesting design ideas, but there's no denying it was a raw experience.

csunbird 7y ago
HOMM V was also a kind of failure in balance aspect until they fixed it. Do you remember Raise Dead/Resurrection spam and necromancers moving around 10k skeleton archers?
- b0rsuk 7y ago
  I never got much into H5. To be frank I was disgusted by V's art direction, obnoxious story, and the initiative system was a far cry from the elegant one from IV. But there's no denying H5 did get fixed and plenty of people like it. I heard it favorably compared to H5 and H6 numerous times. It's like Quake 3 which I initially disliked but later learned to appreciate it for what it is. Problems with IV were fundamental, especially AI, the extremely linear campaign with constricted path and a megaton of scripted events. And that's ironic because the main designer wanted it to be "back to strategic roots". Potion of immortality is something not easily solved with a balance patch where you just tweak a few numbers. The 'heroes as units' system is fundamentally hard to balance in a game where heroes grow on logarithmic scale and armies on linear scale. In hindsight it might seem silly to expect hero power progression that remains distinct for hero types and scales perfectly to plus infinity, but that's more less what people expected after huge maps of Heroes3, with caverns which morphed from an extra place to put loot (as initially designed) to a whole second world. It frustrates me to this day, because there are many very interesting design ideas in there. Of course, All the initial games (Heroes I,II, III) were very incremental in design. All creatures from H1 made it to H2, all from H2 made it to H3. It had to change, it had to be re-imagined. If for no other reason that extra permutation of stats and abilities start feeling very same-y when the system doesn't have enough depth. It's easy to spot that, for example, level7 creatures used the 250 life, 30-40ish damage and growth 3/week template with little deviation. Heroes III felt the most template'y and elsewhere I made some very good points that Heroes II had much better design, especially spell balance. The most powerful spells in Heroes III are the first level ones - stuff like haste, slow scales extremely well with army size and you get mass version through an Expert magic skill.

b0rsuk 7y ago

DooM, the first one, was likely a commercial failure. They made the shareware episodes too generous, and plenty of people played them in multiplayer for days. DooM 2 was a map pack with several new monsters and a new weapon, but most importantly it was meant to pay for DooM 1.

onion2k 7y ago
If you limit it to just the PC shareware version then perhaps. If you include all the special editions and the ports as part of the same game then there's no way it was a failure. It's been released about 50 times..
smcl 7y ago
Failure in the sense that they "left money on the table" so to speak, maybe. But by all accounts even with the generous shareware episode they did extremely well for themselves.
ido 7y ago
It still sold a ton (multiple millions of units): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(1993_video_game)#Commercial_and_spreading_performance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(1993_video_game)#Commerc...

Marazan 7y ago

That page describes the PS2 as technically superior to the Dreamcast. Ah yes, all those technically superior jaggy polygons.

speedgoose 7y ago
The DVD player was a very good advantage of the PS2.
tinkthank 7y ago
I mean, from a technical standpoint the PS2 has higher raw performance numbers: 300MHz vs. 200MHz CPU, 150MHz vs. 100MHz GPU, 32MB vs 16MB RAM, etc. Even factoring architecture differences, those are some large number differences. Of course, what developers actually DO with the added power is another story. Just like some later DC games looked better than early PS2 games, some of the later PS2 games would have been impossible to bring to the DC. And they did manage to eventually find a workaround for the lack of AA on the PS2 with those ugly bloom and "smear" filters. ;)

kalado 7y ago

A lot of games failure names strong competion on release. So if you want to release an indie game, january is recommended.