8 Video Games That "Couldn't Fail" (That Still Failed)
7. Star Wars Outlaws
Star Wars has remained phenomenally popular for the better part of a half-century, and so in theory a AAA video game based on the brand shouldn't have any trouble finding success.
Just look at the last two Star Wars Battlefront games, which despite their many flaws both managed to shift units by the bucket-load.
How could Star Wars Outlaws - a new open-world AAA single-player adventure - possibly fail, then? Given that the game was being published by Ubisoft - the king of turning 7/10s into commercial smash hits - it just didn't seem possible.
But despite being broadly well-received, Outlaws underperformed financially, leaving industry analysts scrambling to explain how a glossy, cinematic, open-world Star Wars game could fail to find an audience.
Some pointed to a general fatigue with open world games, others suggested the game's divisive protagonist, and then there's the rather wobbly state of the Star Wars franchise at present, which has left many casual fans bouncing off the IP.
It was an unfortunate confluence of circumstances which ensured that, while Outlaws is a perfectly fine game, it just wasn't enough to persuade people to open their wallets.