10 Video Games That Totally Wasted Their Biggest Selling Point

The "definition of insanity"? Building a marketing campaign around a character you don’t use.

Whether your production budget is reaching for the skies or buried under a mountain of paperwork, you need a hook for your video game to really take off. Newer genres like first-person 'walking simulators' and roguelikes fall back on exemplary stories or loot-grinding gameplay mechanics to hold you in their midst, but there are many age-old staples of marketing that work wonders if the right amount of care and attention is thrown their way.

Every long-standing, easily-recognisable character or gameplay aspect had to start somewhere, and although such a quality can receive quite the boost of popularity depending on various factors at time of release (Sonic the Hedgehog releasing amidst the "Radical, bro" 90s, for example), it remains that if you're then going to frame your entire PR campaign around such a thing, you'd better deliver on it.

Now, take that ideology and apply it to the ludicrously budgeted likes of the modern era, and wasted potential can be just as crippling as an outright broken game. Anticipation and hype are forever through the roof if you're a gamer, and when those emotional investments you're making don't pay off, well, you get these...

Gaming Editor
Gaming Editor

WhatCulture's Head of Gaming.