10 Ridiculous Reasons Video Games Were Blamed For Failing
6. PC Piracy - Unreal Tournament 3
Once upon a time, Unreal was an absolute juggernaut of a tentpole FPS franchise, scoring both rave reviews from critics and strong sales.
But then Unreal Tournament 3 was released for PC and consoles in 2007 and, despite solid reviews, absolutely died commercially on PC, selling just 33,995 copies in almost an entire month of release.
A few years later in 2010, developer Epic Games blamed the underperformance of several of their games on piracy, a claim which might've seemed more persuasive had Unreal Tournament 3 posted gangbusters sales on PS3 and Xbox 360.
And yet, the game ultimately limped over the 1 million sales line, shifting barely half of what 1999's legendary Unreal Tournament sold years earlier despite its console release getting a massive marketing push.
Furthermore, the primary attraction of the Unreal Tournament games is undeniably the online multiplayer, which piracy would largely have locked players out of anyway.
In reality, Unreal Tournament 3 failed to connect for a number of reasons: its muddy, dark art-style, lack of launch content, lackluster campaign, and the general feeling that it didn't offer enough of a leap from Unreal Tournament 2004.
With Halo dominating the sci-fi FPS space at this point in time, it just wasn't good enough, and players summarily voted with their wallets. Piracy is an all-too-convenient boogeyman on which publishers regularly try to hang their failures.