10 Video Game Franchises With ONE Game Everyone Hates

SimCity is one of the most impressively consistent video game franchises of all time - or was, until 2013's much-anticipated reboot fell totally flat on its face.

Given Maxis' rock solid track record with the series, there was every pre-release reason to believe that they'd deliver on the promise of fully 3D visuals, a whole new game engine, and online multiplayer functionality.

But then it came out, and to call SimCity's launch a disaster is an embarrassment to disasters.

EA's requirement that players remain connected to the Internet while playing, even in single-player, caused massive headaches upon release, with network outages preventing players from using the game they'd paid hard-earned money to play, while save data was also lost for some.

Even EA themselves later called SimCity's launch "dumb," yet took an entire year to remove the always-online requirement.

In addition to all this, the game was filled with bugs and the much-ballyhooed multiplayer suite was ultimately a shallow assembly of features at best.

The near-universal disdain from fans led to the game flopping commercially, effectively killing the franchise dead, which is surely the saddest outcome from the whole debacle.

EA took the game's failure to mean that fans weren't interested in the series anymore, rather than acknowledge that they made a shallow cash-grab which was soundly rejected.