10 Great Video Games Everybody Just Stopped Playing
These games all had a massive player exodus.
The modern gaming landscape is an utter embarrassment of riches, enough that there simply isn't enough time to play all the great games out there, especially if an immersive time sink manages to get its hooks in you.
Publishers are of course hugely concerned about "engagement" and keeping players playing their games for as long as possible, but between the sheer wealth of competition across all genres and attention spans being what they are, it's incredibly difficult to keep hold of players en masse.
Even accepting that, though, these 10 acclaimed video games all suffered some severely sharp drop-offs after launch, with the majority of players suddenly putting each game down and just never returning to it.
Perhaps players at large quickly exhausted the amount of content on offer, got stuck on a brutal difficulty spike, or simply grew frustrated with the developers' attempts to keep the game "alive."
Whatever the reason, these games all failed to maintain their player bases long-term, ensuring that the majority dropped them and moved onto something else in short order.
The lesson here? The secret sauce of player retention is incredibly difficult to nail down...
10. Red Dead Redemption 2
Red Dead Redemption 2 is an utterly mesmerising achievement from Rockstar - an intoxicatingly rich Western masterpiece which basically dares players not to pour hundreds of hours into its mind-bogglingly immersive open world.
And yet, PlayStation trophy data indicates that there came a point where players en masse just fell off the game and never got around to finishing it.
Only 29.8% of players have popped the trophy for finishing the Arthur-starring main portion of the game, while the John Marston-centric epilogue mustered just 26.4%.
Even accepting that Red Dead Redemption 2's campaign can easily take 50+ hours to beat and much longer given the many optional distractions on offer, it's shocking that barely one-quarter of those who bought the game stuck with it long enough to see the end.
Even though the cinematically-driven campaign isn't particularly difficult, it was likely a matter of fatigue which prevented so many from reaching the end, with many having their fill of Rockstar's sprawling open world before they could bring the story to a close.