20 Disastrous Gaming Launches Everyone Saw Coming

Given the enormous cost of making and releasing a AAA game, it's little surprise that publishers like to promote them extensively before their release, to ensure total saturation of market awareness.

It was immediately puzzling, then, that sci-fi actioner MindsEye had little marketing presence to speak of until a few weeks prior to launch, when IO Interactive finally started giving it the hard sell.

Much fuss was made of the game being directed by Grand Theft Auto producer Leslie Benzies, yet the trailers ultimately failed to sell MindsEye as anything more than another identikit action game destined to come and go in a blip.

It didn't help that the CLO and CFO of developer Build a Rocket Boy quit the company a week before release, review copies were withheld from critics, and the dev also tried to stop people streaming the game on release day.

The ugly truth was that MindsEye launched feeling fundamentally unfinished, and even what was there was profoundly lacking in any personality or spark of its own.

In addition to the critical drubbing, the game peaked at barely 3,000 concurrent Steam players, and that number tumbled off a cliff within mere days as many reportedly sought refunds.