10 "Next Big Thing" Video Games That Completely Flopped

4. Battleborn

Project Milo
2K Games

The first game on the list that vied for Overwatch's crown and lost catastrophically, Gearbox Software's Battleborn was marked for failure long before it came out.

Despite the developers constantly saying how cool and original the multiplayer title was going to be, for the first few months following the title's announcement most players didn't even know what it was.

Was it a first-person shooter similar to Borderlands? An MMO? A competitive multiplayer game? Gearbox couldn't answer any of these questions, and as a result, players began to look elsewhere for their shooter fix.

The miscommunication would have been a big problem if it was the only thing holding Battleborn back, but when Overwatch rolled in and stole away the game's potential market, it became just one of many factors that doomed the title to obscurity.

When the game eventually released, nobody was there to give it a chance because they were all smitten with Blizzard's world-conquering phenomenon, and Gearbox quietly gave up on trying to make Battleborn a thing a year later.

In this post: 
Project Milo
 
First Posted On: 
Contributor

Writer. Mumbler. Only person on the internet who liked Spider-Man 3