10 Video Game Bombs That Made ONE Fatal Mistake
These games were all their own undoing.
Much as 2023 marked a banner year for quality video games of all shapes and sizes - even as the industry is seriously struggling at present - it is an undeniably unforgiving medium where developers can spend years working on a new game, only for it to flop at launch.
Sometimes the reasons for this aren't easy to ascertain, but there are also instances where a game's commercial failure was extremely obvious even to casual, outside observers. And so, you have to wonder what those in charge were thinking at all.
These video games all failed to sell as their publishers hoped on release, and yet, it's also clear that each of these games failed to attract players en masse for one very specific reason.
Sure, they may have been imperfect in a number of ways, but there's one particular, overpowering factor which kept every single one of these games from enjoying commercial success.
If nothing else, they should all serve as loud warnings for what developers and publishers positively shouldn't do when both making and releasing a game.
Things didn't have to be this way, but because someone was asleep at the wheel, they all landed with an epic thud...
10. Not Releasing Free-To-Play - Crash Team Rumble
Granted, you can argue that Crash Team Rumble's mere existence is one big mistake, given that Crash Bandicoot 4 developer Toys for Bob were forced to make the multiplayer party game instead of the fifth Crash game fans actually wanted.
All the same, on paper this wasn't exactly a terrible idea, especially considering the popularity of 2000's Crash-themed Mario Party knock-off Crash Bash. But Activision made one major miscalculation which demonstrated a fatal misunderstanding of the current gaming market.
Crash Team Rumble launched for a retail price of £25/$30, and while that certainly can't be dubbed a rip-off price point, many fans nevertheless felt that it should've been a free-to-play game, given the scant amount of content and relatively repetitive gameplay loop.
In an era where free-to-play games are commonplace - and typically funded, with varying degrees of success, by battle passes and cosmetic microtransactions - Crash Team Rumble seems like an optimistic relic, no matter that the core gameplay is completely fine, if certainly not remarkable.
It's unlikely that the game would've been a smash hit were it free-to-play, but at least it probably wouldn't have been beaten by a two-year old Peppa Pig game on launch.