20 Ridiculous Reasons Video Games Were Cancelled
The deeply bizarre and stupid reasons you'll never get to play these games.
Games development is one hell of a precarious business, enough that bringing any game to market - big or small, good or bad - is basically nothing short of a miracle.
And it's a process that's only getting tougher, costlier, and longer with each passing year, as evidenced by the increasing number of AAA games which take close to a decade to reach our screens.
And of course, there are dozens and dozens of games cancelled every single year too, from majorly high-profile, much-hyped titles to those which the general public wasn't ever supposed to know about.
While games are often cancelled for reasons like changing market trends, publisher bankruptcy, and so on, sometimes the rationale gets a little more puzzling, and you have to wonder whether those in charge really thought much about the business decisions they were making.
These 20 games were all cancelled for utterly baffling reasons, from foreseeable technical issues to cowardly publisher politicking, childish in-fighting, and even a Twitter beef.
Despite the clear potential all of these games had, they sadly ended up being scrapped for totally head-scratching reasons...
20. An Open-World Spy Game "Wouldn't Work" - Agent
Agent was a Cold War-set stealth-action game from Rockstar Games that was formally announced in June 2009, though despite considerable interest from fans of Rockstar's AAA back catalogue, the publisher went radio silent on the project in the years that followed.
A trademark renewal in 2016 triggered rumours of an imminent re-reveal, though it was later allowed to lapse and Rockstar then stopped maintaining the official Agent website.
By 2023, a former technical director at Rockstar North more-or-less confirmed that Agent had been cancelled years prior, partly due to a desire to focus resources on Grand Theft Auto V.
Back but in October we got a more substantive update, when Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser revealed that Agent went through numerous failed iterations before they surmised it wasn't possible to make a "good, open-world spy game."
While Houser and co. clearly know a thing or two about games development, it was nevertheless an unsatisfying answer to fans, because of course there are many, many players who would love to play an open-world game centered around espionage.
To say that it just couldn't work seems a bit defeatist.