10 Beloved Video Game Studios That Publishers RUINED

7. Beenox

For the longest time, Beenox were the little studio that could. Initially conceived as a porting house, the company eventually moved on to create their own original games (starting with, uh, Bee Movie Game) before Activision put them in charge of Spider-Man.

After a few years of disappointing open-world tie-ins, the new developers took the reigns and created Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions, a genuinely innovative take on the wall crawler that blended a bunch of different versions of the superhero into one story-driven extravaganza.

Despite selling well and scoring high with critics, the harsh reality of licensed games quickly caught up to the studio. Activision gave them a year to craft a follow-up, Edge of Time, which wore its rushed development on its sleeve. They bounced back with the criminally underrated tie-in to the original Amazing Spider-Man film, but suffered again from a lack of time and money on the sequel.

Following this, Beenox were relegated to being a support studio for Call of Duty and other Activision titles, taken off their own original games. That’s what they’ve spent the past few years doing, with their only notable game being the (admittedly stellar-looking) remake of Crash Team Racing.

Spider-Man is in better hands now, but Beenox’s talents are being wasted.

[JB]