10 Video Games That Just Got Cancelled

Generally speaking when any video game spends long enough in development, the publisher will see it as enough of a sunk cost that it absolutely, positively has to release eventually, no matter what state it might be in.

Yet Blizzard is no ordinary publisher, and recently ended up sinking the colossal costs of shuttering a game which had been in development for more than six years.

Blizzard's first new IP since Overwatch was set to be a survival game codenamed "Odyssey," which began development in 2017 and would've revolved around players navigating portals between contemporary Earth and a rich fantasy world, with large maps featuring instances of 100 players at once.

A Bloomberg report detailed that despite a positive reception from beta testers, the game was axed due to problems with its bespoke engine, which would've likely pushed release back to 2026 at the earliest. With that, Blizzard opted instead to focus their resources on more promising projects.

The cancellation led to most of the 200-strong dev team working on Odyssey being let go, amid Microsoft's wider culling of almost 2,000 jobs across their entire gaming division.