10 Awful Video Games That Almost Everybody Plays

In the history of video games, there have been plenty of overlooked, underplayed gems that deserved far more attention than they actually received. Maybe they struggled to find themselves an audience, or maybe they just couldn’t live up to the publisher’s unrealistic expectations, but for one reason or another, they absolutely floundered commercially.

Games like Psychonauts and Okami are notorious examples of games that were celebrated and revered critically, yet went almost entirely unnoticed by the general public. In fairness, it isn’t necessarily the fault of consumers; after all, you can’t expect people to spend their hard earned money on games they don’t understand, or games that weren’t marketed properly, or games that just didn’t interest them, for whatever reason.

With that said, while you can’t blame people for what they don’t buy, you most certainly can blame them for they do. The fact that franchises like Call of Duty and Assassin’s Creed are consistently outselling everything else on the market is bad enough, but there’s absolutely no excuse for the popularity of games like Destiny or Evolve.

Regardless of how poorly they perform, or how badly they suck, people just can’t seem to get enough of these uninspiring titles; they’ll play them all the time, and they’ll empty their wallets in order to do so. Here are the worst offenders…

The biggest, loudest shooter on the market, Call of Duty is perhaps the most contentious entry on this list. For whatever reason, a lot of people seem to like it. Granted, most of those people are prepubescent, but the point still stands: Call of Duty is a beloved franchise, played all over the world by a multitude of different people.

Why? I haven’t a clue. The series hasn’t developed in any meaningful way in over a decade, the multiplayer is bland and uninteresting, and the singleplayer is just a succession of myriad cutscenes and set-pieces that rarely allow for any real sense of player involvement. Worst of all, the story has developed into something almost laughable; Advanced Warfare was essentially about Kevin Spacey trying to invade the United States, and Ghosts III – despite the title, which suggests an element of stealth – involved cyber-augmentation, killer robots and lots and lots of armoured tanks.

Yet, despite all of this, Call of Duty continues to outsell the competition every single year. People buy it because it’s safe; they know exactly what they’re going to get, and even though what they get is usually dull, at least it can’t disappoint their painfully low expectations.