10 Video Game Franchises That Just Sat Out An ENTIRE Generation
Missing in action.
Often it's a poorly made product that sends a franchise underground, never to emerge for years. Others end up dormant for a litany of reasons; player fatigue is one example. If a franchise becomes over-saturated and the fans begin to tire of the same formula, diminishing returns set in.
Or it could simply be a lack of interest from the developer. With new console generations, developers often take chances with original franchises and these can supersede those that came before, becoming a guiding force for publishers going forward. Several IPs have found themselves outclassed and outsold by contemporaries, their genres reapplied to new settings and design documents.
In other cases, deciding on creative vision and direction for a franchise can be tricky business. How do you best compete with the competition? How do you continue a series without straying too far from what made it work?
These are just some of the many questions that leave creative IPs floating in limbo. At many points, they often sit out entire console generations, lying in wait for their chance to make a comeback.
10. Dead Island
Of the many zombie games that have launched, Dead Island stood in the middle, offering both bloody carnage and deeply misleading trailer footage in equal measure back on the PS3 and Xbox 360.
Dead Island's place as a middle-market title earned it some recognition from players looking for a riotous rampage across a holiday paradise gone wrong. When it came to the sequel however, development was and still is a tedious slog. It's transferred through multiple developers and hardly made much progress.
Originally announced at Sony's E3 presser in 2014, Dead Island 2 was going for a more vibrant art style, expansions to weaponry and gameplay and potentially a story that embraced the silly over the serious.
As it was transferred from Yager Development to Sumo Digital and finally Dambuster Studios, it appears to have been supplanted by Techland's Dying Light.
While not officially cancelled by any studio, Dead Island's extended period in development difficulty has caused it to skip over the PS4 and Xbox One generation. It's possible the game may be rebuilt for the upcoming ninth console generation, but with no updates since August 2019 it's hard to tell. That didn't stop leakers from finding a 2015 version of the game and putting it online however.