10 Video Game Developers Who Killed The Franchise They Were Handed

7. Rockstar - Max Payne

One of those rare occasions when a sole batch of screenshots tanked a project before it was even in motion, all people wanted after hearing about how Remedy wouldn't be making Max Payne 3, was reassurance. As a franchise, Max Payne felt authored; incredibly unique to Remedy as a studio and as characterful to play as it was to indulge cutscene-wise.

To take such an auteured body of work with so many stylistic decisions and hand it off to another studio was risky. Risky to the point of if any one part of it went wrong, the future of the property would be in jeopardy.

And yet... Rockstar thought the best way to reassure fans of Max's 1940s film noir trappings... was to release images of him bald, in a Hawaiian shirt, amongst the Brazilian favelas. Literally just the exact opposite of what anybody wanted.

Annoyingly in this case, Max Payne 3 is a damn good game, with possibly the best third-person shooting Rockstar have ever devised.

Sales went nowhere though, coming in at only half of what L.A. Noire initially took, tanking all hope for any continuations in the future.