10 Upcoming Video Games Being Sent Out To Die

Making a video game - even a bad one - is so much harder than anyone outside of games development can ever fully comprehend.

And so, it's basically a miracle of perseverance that any games get to the end of the process in a polished and entertaining state.

Video games are of course a collision of art and commerce, and as we've seen so many times over the years, that commerce side often ends up taking extreme precedent.

For one of many reasons, a publisher might decide to send a game out knowing full well that it's either an inferior product or hasn't got a chance in hell of being a commercial success.

Perhaps the publisher has just given up on a troubled project, is simply completing a contractual obligation, or is doing only the bare minimum to promote their new release.

Whatever the circumstances, and regardless of who is to blame, these 10 upcoming video games are all being released to what seems guaranteed to be critical and/or commercial failure.

We'd love to be wrong, for sure, but the writing seems very much on the wall for these titles...

We'll be seeing Ubisoft on this list a number of times, beginning with a game that also showed up on last year's list - Skull and Bones.

Announced way back at E3 2017, the publisher's pirate-themed action-adventure game was effectively an attempt to spin Assassin's Creed: Black Flag's naval combat off into its own full-fat AAA title - an idea that, on paper, should've been quick and easy.

Yet Skull and Bones missed its planned late 2018 release, with word going quiet until the end of 2020, when it was said to have been rebooted with a "new vision."

Last summer it was finally dated for November 8 of that year, but was ultimately pushed back to March 9 of this year, before recently being delayed again to a vague "2023-2024 fiscal year" date.

It's painfully clear that Ubisoft has a dud on their hands here and will eventually just put it out to be done with it.

Ubisoft needs to release it eventually as the game was heavily subsidised by the Singaporean government, but with anonymous play-testers recently suggesting it's still in rough shape, it's not looking like it'll enjoy a phoenix-like resurrection.

Expect Skull and Bones to unceremoniously slither into storefronts sometime over the next year-or-so - if the new release window sticks, that is - and be quickly forgotten amid a whiff of indifference from critics and players alike.