10 Beloved Video Game Studios That Publishers RUINED

7. Beenox

Spider Man Shattered Dimensions
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]

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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.

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Josh has over 11 years of experience as a published writer, having worked nine of those years as a full-time content producer at WhatCulture. In that period he has created hundreds of articles, videos and podcast episodes for multiple WhatCulture channels, specialising in gaming, horror and film & TV. He now primarily works as a senior content producer and presenter on WhatCulture Gaming where he co-hosts the WhatCulture Gaming Podcast, a top 3 UK most listened to gaming podcast that he co-created in 2018. Over the years he has reviewed several high-profile gaming releases, covered industry events with on-site reporting, opined on breaking news, and even kicked off his interviewing career by chatting to childhood hero, Tommy Wiseau.