10 Video Games They Were Right To Cancel
Cutting their losses was the right thing to do.
The intensely secretive nature of the video game industry means that there are so many more games cancelled than we as players are ever even made aware of.
But when an anticipated game gets a high-profile canning, it can certainly hurt.
It's tough not to think of any cancelled game and consider, "what if?" The fact that we'll never get to see the likes of Star Wars 1313, Fez 2, Hideo Kojima's Silent Hills, Prey 2, and so many other intriguing, ambitious titles is a huge shame.
And while we as players are basically conditioned to rake publishers over the coals for their oft-cynical business decisions, there are times where their logic for binning a game is absolutely water-tight.
Now to be clear, we're not dancing on the graves of any cancelled games here, but making sense of why the publishers made the decision to cut them loose, and how that ultimately reasoned out as the right choice all things considered.
On paper there were many who wanted to see these games come to market, but knowing what we do now, it's easier to appreciate why they were stopped short of the finish line...
10. TimeSplitters Next
In 2021, Deep Silver announced a long-awaited reboot of the beloved FPS franchise TimeSplitters, with original developer Free Radical Design even being reformed to oversee production with numerous key personnel from the earlier games returning.
Word went quiet for the next two years, but at the tail-end of 2023, Free Radical owner Embracer Group revealed that the company had been closed, in turn resulting in the cancellation of the new TimeSplitters.
Fans were naturally heartbroken, or at least they were, until subsequent leaks revealed that the original vision for "TimeSplitters Next" was to make it a third-person Fortnite clone.
The anonymous leaker not only posted gameplay footage of the project, but revealed that it was intended to be a free-to-play battle royale title - a direction most of the dev team themselves were against, let alone fans.
The leaker added that the Fortnite clone was eventually scrapped sometime in 2023, with Free Radical then focusing instead on a more conventional remake of the series' consensus-favourite entry, TimeSplitters 2.
While it's a damn shame that the TimeSplitters 2 remake will never see the light of day, it's totally logical that a Fortnite knock-off cynically posing as a TimeSplitters reboot got thrown in the trash.