10 Incredible Video Games Most People Abandoned At The Start

With players having more gaming options available at their fingertips for less money than ever before, it's increasingly tricky for developers to actually keep eyeballs on their games for a sustained period.

Trophy data, while not an exact science, makes it clear that the vast majority of players don't actually finish most of the games they buy. 

Whether they lose interest, real life gets in the way, or they're lured away by the latest shiny hotness, the percentage of players who will actually beat even a relatively short game is insanely small, no matter how great it might be.

But what's more surprising is that there are many brilliant games out there which the majority of players bailed from early on. 

While it's more understandable that not all players will invest dozens of hours making it to the end of a great game, for them to lose motivation in the early going is certainly more peculiar.

In some cases these superb games might have slow prologue sections, or maybe the first boss is actually the most difficult in the entire game. 

Elsewhere, it's a little tougher to figure out precisely what made so many put these games down early and never return...

In Housemarque's face-melting roguelike third-person shooter Returnal, you can quite reasonably reach its first boss, Phrike, in less than two hours. 

Despite Phrike being the game's first major encounter, however, it offers up one hell of a challenge, enough that to date, 67.6% of players have never even beaten the boss at all.

Now to be completely fair here, players are absolutely supposed to spend many more hours building up their loadout before finally felling Phrike, but given that less than one-third of players ever made it past the boss, it's clear that folks hit a brick wall early on and quickly peaced out.

A month after the game's release, Housemarque even revealed that Phrike was the game's boss which killed players the most, indicating that the game's first boss is also its toughest, but that if players could prevail over Phrike, they had a much better chance of beating the rest of Returnal's tough-as-nails bosses.

On one hand it's a shame that so many bailed on Returnal so early, but on the other, the developer surely knew exactly what they were doing by making Phrike so tricky to put down.