10 REAL Reasons Why These Video Games Failed

Cyberpunk, after almost a decade of being teased by developer CD Projekt RED (your scribe, for example, was about 16 when he first heard about it) was finally released to near universal hatred. It's legitimately hilarious how vitriolic the response to this game was, especially because of how - yeah, it was completely warranted.

In the aftermath, journalists - desperate to learn why CD Projekt RED, once the golden boys of western RPGs, had failed so spectacularly - latched onto the intense crunch the studio forced the dev team to endure in order to meet its release schedule. The story goes the developers assumed they'd finish the game in 2022, so when a 2020 release date was announced, they couldn't believe how much work they'd have ahead of them.

And that was definitely part of the reason the game turned out to be such a mess, but like Blizzard earlier in the list, it goes deeper than that.

CD Projekt RED made The Witcher 3, one of the most beloved and acclaimed RPGs ever made. And because of that, the heads of development got it into their heads that they were the top dogs and no one could touch them. That kind of mindset is poisonous to any kind of art creation, let alone video games. Add the intense crunch of its dev team on top of that, and you get a toxic cocktail that led to one of the biggest embarrassments of any video game company in the industry's history.