10 Video Games That Killed Themselves Trying To Be Popular

7. Fuse

"The game started out with a much more stylized and campy direction. We were actually going for something on the level of Ratchet & Clank, except with humans [...] We would focus test the game in front of a lot of gamers, and get their opinion. These are people that regularly play PlayStation 3 and Xbox games. We started to discover that everyone thought this was a game for their younger brother. We would hear this from 12-year-olds. So we decided that we needed to make a game that had an older appeal." -Bryan Allgeier.

Doesn't that just break your heart a bit? Here we have the guys who made Ratchet & Clank (admittedly as a response to the rise in shooters, as Spyro was famously demoted for "not being able to carry a gun"), yet rather than have a natural progression between the two ideologies, we got this hokum.

Originally existing as Overstrike, Fuse was literally focus-tested to death. Everything from turret sequences to an arbitrary stop n' pop cover system made it in to appease the testers, and along the way, every original idea Insomniac had was cast to the wayside.

Considering the team ended up 'regressing' back to completely remaking Ratchet & Clank in 2016 - only for it to soar to spectacular heights both critically and commercially - it proves one thing; never listen to 12 year-olds. Ever.