10 Ridiculous Reasons Video Games Were Blamed For Failing
8. Developers Not Working Hard Enough - Overkill's The Walking Dead
If all else fails, just blame the developers themselves, right? That's what Overkill Software ex-CEO Bo Andersson did when Overkill's The Walking Dead was a critical and commercial flop back in 2018.
When Andersson resigned as CEO in the wake of the game's failure, he sent a final e-mail to the dev team making his feelings on the matter abundantly, horrendously clear:
"Personally though I lost all my money, my family in divorce and my kids custody through the toil over the last 2-3 years working 100 hour weeks for Starbreeze and keeping you devs paid and in the game… With less and less developers willing to put in the extra care in a product it clearly limits the possible result of enough quality in time."
Andersson was widely criticised for the e-mail, which ran counter to claims from the developers that they were fighting with an awkward engine from the very start of development, and had worked intense crunch periods leading up to the game's release.
The project was also characterised as mismanaged and damaged by a creeping scope, making it clear there simply wasn't a coherent, confident vision for the game from the higher-ups, rather than its failure being the fault of the employees doing the programming, art, sound design, and so on.