10 Video Games That KILLED Other Video Games

A fourth entry into the beloved FPS franchise TimeSplitters was first announced in August 2007, but after developer Free Radical went into administration and was bought out by Crytek in 2009, TimeSplitters 4 was put "on hold" and effectively cancelled.

Though many assumed that Crytek either felt that the third TimeSplitters game, Future Perfect, didn't sell enough or they wanted Free Radical to work on their Crysis series, that's actually not why TimeSplitters 4 never materialised.

The real reason? The catastrophic critical and commercial failure of Free Radical's last game, 2008's Haze, which had been hyped up as a "Halo killer" in the media, only to received aggressively mediocre reviews for its generic FPS gameplay.

Despite Free Radical shopping around a playable demo of TimeSplitters 4 to publishers before being acquired by Crytek, Haze's failure had irreversibly tarnished their reputation in the industry, with all publishers passing on the game amid the belief that Free Radical couldn't deliver a commercial hit.

And so, the failed ambition of Haze is to blame for TimeSplitters never getting the fourth game so many fans assumed would be a sure thing.

Though a reformed iteration of Free Radical is currently at work on a new TimeSplitters game in collaboration with publisher Deep Silver, we'll have to see whether it actually comes to fruition.