10 Obvious Video Game Home Runs That Somehow FAILED

10. Titanfall Series

Granted, it's cheating a little to lump both entries in Respawn's cult series together, but in this instance, it's worth looking at the bigger picture. 

Why? Because, incidentally, both instalments suffered commercial failure for wildly different reasons. Titanfall snapped up over 60 awards for its debut showing at E3 2013. When it rolled around less than a year later, release scores mimicked that initial success. Considering the FPS pedigree employed by Respawn, sublime gameplay was a given; everything else fell below par. Poor net code, the near-total lack of a single-player campaign, and the eternal struggle of establishing a new IP all contributed to Titanfall's, well, fall.

So Respawn went back to the drawing board with Titanfall 2. The sequel rectified every criticism of the original — the campaign is one of the best you'll find in an FPS — and then some, but fell far short of sales projections, nonetheless. EA, in its infinite wisdom as an industry-leading publisher, decided to engage in self-sabotage and dropped Titanfall 2 between the launch of its own Battlefield 1 and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. Two massive IPs compared to Respawn's.

To this day, nobody knows what the suits at EA were smoking to think competing with itself was smart business acumen.