10 Great Video Game Developers Who Haven't Made Anything Good For Years

5. Turtle Rock

Commonly confused with Valve (who I'll get to in a moment), Turtle Rock made their impact on the industry off the back of Counterstrike, only to be acquired by Valve and drop the almighty Left 4 Dead 1 and 2.

For many this would be enough - and perhaps it could've been if the team split to conquer other ventures - but after splitting with Valve and signing with 2K, they fell victim to one of the most disappointing titles of the generation: Evolve.

It was bad enough that various Turtle Rock interviews appeared to champion the idea of DLC and segmented game design being a positive, but Evolve itself was just deflating and boring to interact with. Centred on asymmetrical multiplayer with players controlling soldiers and one ginormous beast, either you were stuck searching the map for the duration of a bout, or you flattened the opposition in seconds.

Needless to say, the player base fell off a cliff and Turtle Rock attempted to make a free-to-play version of the game using all that DLC to recoup their funds, but that too only resulted in a negative response.

The company's latest attempt at a revival is to ditch 2K and sign with Warner Bros. for, you guessed it, a cash-grab attempt to revive Left 4 Dead as the terribly titled "Back 4 Blood".

As much as I have faith in the coders and art department at Turtle Rock, WB will take every opportunity to milk the L4D fandom for all they've got when it comes to recurrent spending and microtransactions. There's simply no way they don't drain every ounce of goodwill from the project, but I'd love to be proven wrong.