10 Video Games You Didn't Realise Secretly Bombed

Death Stranding started strong and fell off a cliff.

By Jack Pooley /

Kojima Productions

Sadly not every great game can be a stonking commercial success too, and we're all familiar with the likes of Grim Fandango, Shenmue and Psychonauts - cult classic games that, despite receiving strong critical acclaim upon release, failed to break out where it mattered most.

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But what about those games whose commercial difficulties were a little more low-key? These 10 games, each of them praised by critics, nevertheless released to quietly soft sales, all while many fans didn't even notice.

In many instances this is a case of the publisher either intentionally not reporting poor sales, or more daringly deciding to roll the dice on a sequel regardless of the mediocre sales, seeming to suggest that it actually sold just fine.

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While few would erroneously hold these games up as storming sales hits, each nevertheless managed to (mostly) avoid the bad press associated with a poor launch, and so to all but the most eagle-eyed players, they seemed to be profitable. Oh, how wrong we all were...