10 Video Game Bombs That Made ONE Fatal Mistake
6. Trying To Please Everyone (And Pleasing NO ONE) - Saints Row (2022)
Marketing 101 dictates that, above all else, you need to make the audience aware of exactly what your product is, and that was the critical failure of Volition's 2022 Saints Row reboot.
Sure, we all knew it was the latest entry into the developer's hit sandbox action franchise, but the marketing failed to clarify precisely who it was made for.
Trailers and previews painted a wildly mixed picture of what Saints Row was trying to be - at once tidying up the series' edgier past and trying to make the central characters more likeable, while still retaining some of the IP's signature silliness.
And yet, the result was a game that tried too hard to appeal to everyone and, consequently, left few satisfied.
Newcomers felt like they were being cynically pandered to while core fans of the series felt that its identity had shifted too far away from that of the more unhinged earlier games.
Even the fact that the gameplay is grossly unpolished couldn't have entirely doomed it if it had the charm and personality of the previous Saints Row games.
But instead it felt like a lamely corporate wax-work impersonation of the series that never once passed the sniff test, and so flopped epically.