10 Terrible Decisions That Doomed Popular Video Game Companies

The world of video games is a precarious one. Building a release is costly, time-consuming and difficult; hell, getting a game made at all is a mini-miracle in itself, never mind whether or not it's actually any good or sells well. Combine that with higher-up executives who are only in the game to appease their evil overlords (aka the shareholders), and you get a whirlwind of issues that can lead to some developers going from being at the top of the world to painful financial ruin seemingly overnight.

The swift, cutthroat nature of the industry sometimes means that companies are only one bad decision from throwing away all the hard work they've delivered into the garbage; committing to a bad idea that can either see the entire studio going under, or reduced to a shell of its former glory. Either way, the results aren't pretty.

Often, the writing in these instances is on the wall, with the inevitable disaster coming to the surprise of pretty much nobody other than the companies themselves. Other times, however, no one could have expected it would all end in tears...