20 Recent Video Games That Were Sent Out To Die

It might seem silly to suggest that any Call of Duty game could possibly be sent out to die, considering both the commercial success of your average entry into the franchise and the mind-boggling amount of money that Activision spends marketing them.

But Black Ops 7 just kept continually throwing up red flags in the months leading up to release.

For one, Activision confirmed that, in an unprecedented move for the franchise, the game was developed by Treyarch and Raven Software at the same time as Black Ops  6.

Though Call of Duty games have traditionally been developed concurrently by separate studios, in this case Treyarch and Raven were making both Black Ops sequels side-by-side - a bold choice which many fans were immediately skeptical of.

But things got much worse on the eve of launch, when reviewers revealed that the campaign couldn't be played offline or even paused, and the game also contained AI-generated art.

This resulted in Black Ops 7 becoming one of the worst-reviewed games in the series and landing the lowest user score in the franchise's history, reflecting its significantly lower sales than Black Ops 6, enough that it was even outsold by competitor Battlefield 6.

Activision sent this thing out into the world with the utmost cynicism that it would be a sales juggernaut regardless of its shadier practises, and while it surely still turned a profit for the publisher, it fell far short of their loftier expectations.