10/10 Video Games The Public REJECTED
3. Planescape: Torment
Following on from games that people love to hate or hate to love, Planescape: Torment is almost universally agreed upon to be one of the greatest games ever made, and in this case both critics and fans seemed to agree.
It was just unfortunate then that nobody bought it.
Despite iterating on digital RPG systems in a fascinating way and enabling player freedom of interaction in a way not many games of this scope and size had done so at the time, Planescape: Torment presented as perhaps a little too niche for its own good. While its grand and delightfully complex narrative and witty dialogue is a joy to immerse yourself in, it was a trickier thing to sell to gamers.
With a 91/100 on Metacritic and a final product that lived up to its 10/10s the game should have been too critically acclaimed to fail even without a successful marketing campaign, but it only sold 73,000 in its first four months on shelves.
The sales numbers improved somewhat over time but at the time Planescape sunk under the weight of bigger RPGs like Ultima IX that released just a month prior.