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While Triple-A gaming is the dominant form of its medium, some games just aren't very good. Many when critiquing a game that flops will attempt to uncover a reason as to why this happens, mostly coming down to publisher interference, or less commonly developer incompetence. In this article, examples of games that are mostly regarded as failures will be presented and yours truly will discuss whether they bombed on part of the publishers or developers.
Fallout 76 is a disaster that knows no bounds even 6 years after it's launch. It almost permanently tarnished the reputation of Bethesda, and shook many people's trust that gaming mega-corporations were capable of making and finishing functional games before release, and that the marketing would be honest. Fallout 76 changed all of that. From 2018 onwards, gamers would almost fear the fact that they were excited for a game. Fallout 76 would launch as one of the most broken video games off all time. While for the sake of your time every bug that was present won't be mentioned, some came down to certain people's devices not even being able to install the game. But the question stills stands as to who's fault it was at Bethesda. The studio is only part at fault by forcing a dev team to produce a game of a genre they were rather unfamiliar with. Bethesda usually makes single-player RPGs and Fallout 76 is an MMORPG, or multiplayer RPG. You could also pin blame on the higher-ups for the marketing campaign they produced, which generated a lot of hype for the game. On the developer side of the coin most people claim that the game was made by an inexperienced B-Team who didn't understand the engine well. However according to Bethesda themselves in interviews before and after the game's launch, many people from across the whole studio were assigned to work on the game. If this is true, the game's poor optimization could be because of developer miscommunication due to the larger staffing. Fallout 76 is an online game and a huge cash printer for Bethesda as of now, which one can imagine is why they've even bothered to fix the game at all. It's pretty easy to say that both parties are at fault for the game being terrible.
Cyberpunk 2077 remains one of the greatest disappointments in gaming history. Unlike Fallout 76, almost nobody was skeptical that the game wouldn't be as good. That is mostly because of the reputation of the developers, CD Projekt RED. With the critically acclaimed Witcher trilogy under their belt everyone was confident in the quality of their next title. It was on December 10th, that people's jaws dropped, and not in a good way. The game wasn't just disappointing, but just plain bad. Even beyond the copious glitches and performance issues the gameplay just wasn't as impressive or innovative as the marketing would imply. Now who's fault is it? From what many can gather is that the dev team were under pressure from shareholders to release the game by the winter season (Games sell incredibly well due to Christmas being in the same month) hence the December 10th release day. Before the game's release, CD Projekt RED made multiple statements that the game would release when it was ready, these statements typically being in response to questions surrounding the game's multiple delays leading up to the launch. The disaster that was Fallout 76 was still fresh in people's minds so most were more than willing to accept the many delays. However, it was still the investors who needed a return, and if that meant the game barely worked on launch, so be it.
Electronic Arts is no stranger to disastrous video game launches. Whether that's Mass Effect: Andromeda, Anthem, or even Battlefield 4. What if BF4 wasn't the only entry in the franchise to fall flat on release. Battlefield 2042 was announced around mid 2021 with an announcement trailer that got not only the fanbase but gamers in general incredibly excited. The previous two games in the series, Battlefield 1 and Battlefield 5, took place in historical settings (being WW1 and WW2) and while those games were critically acclaimed themselves, many fans yearned for another modern military themed entry into the series. So when they were told that was exactly what they were getting, many people got excited. Then the game had it's public beta, and it all fell apart from there. The beta was riddled with terrible performance issues and on top of that such ridiculous glitches that confused players everywhere. However, it was just a beta after all, and the full release would be improved right? The optimists would unfortunately be proven wrong as the full release fixed almost none of the beta's issues. The game was also criticized for a lack of basic features that previous titles contained, example being a basic leaderboard. Even what was there wasn't all that impressive. The specialist system was deemed inferior to the class system that previous games had. Now back to the focus of this article: Who is responsible? Well it's almost entirely on the dev team in this case. after Battlefield 5, many original members of DICE (the developers behind the battlefield games) who had been around since the earliest games in the series left the company, forcing EA to bring in inexperienced developers or contractors. This sounds bad enough, but it also didn't help that the deadline for the release of the game was quickly coming. All in all, not a great situation. The game has improved over time due to it's live service updates, however many fans of the franchise would still recommend previous games to people interested in getting into the series.
The games mentioned are really only a fraction of failures that have occurred in the industry. Even successful titles often went through some form of developer vs. publisher clash. What is important is to identify which is responsible, and then just pray that history doesn't repeat itself.
My name is Gunner Farrell, and you should expect articles about gaming on this column. You can imagine considering I chose gaming as the focus of my column, that I am quite of interest in the genre.
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