The Worst Excuses Companies Gave For Gaming Flops

Video games are an exceptionally challenging medium of entertainment to produce. As noted by Bloomberg, game studios are some of the riskiest investments, because any number of factors can go wrong in development.

Maybe a studio's flagship title is released to stiff competition in a saturated field, or perhaps the development of a game takes longer than expected and needs to update its engine halfway through. Sometimes even the most well-researched and well-produced games will simply fail to connect with their target audience. While the size and scope of each game differs, these risks remain constant and only scale up further with grander ambitions. Some games, for whatever reason, flop pretty hard.

High expectations for an unreleased game can be both a blessing and a curse. Of course, developers and publishers typically want as much attention as possible, but when games fail to live up to elevated preconceptions, a studio has three choices: ignore the criticism, accept the notes and use them proactively, or reject the critiques and give excuses for their shortcomings. What follows is a breakdown of some of the most embarrassing and out-of-left-field explanations for gaming's most memorable flops.

Known for his design work on the "Gears of War" franchise, Cliff Bleszinski went on to create Boss Key Studios. Founded in 2014, the studio adopted the mission of creating a hero-shooter called "LawBreakers."

The development and vision of "LawBreakers" was spearheaded by Bleszinski, and he would have rough times ahead. "LawBreakers" failed to reach more than a few thousand concurrent players upon release in 2017. Its current Metacritic score shows the game itself wasn't exactly terrible, but it failed to catch on with players.

"Overwatch" and its ilk beat "LawBreakers" to the punch, bringing hero shooter mechanics mainstream audiences a year earlier in 2016. However, the eccentric leader of Boss Key Studios — known to many as CliffyB — thought "LawBreakers" failed for another reason.

In a post-mortem Instagram post, Cliff claimed that "LawBreakers' may have failed because, "I pushed my own personal political beliefs in a world that was increasingly divided." Bleszinski expressed his belief that the marketing may have led to some critics writing "LawBreakers" off as a so-called "woke" game. Of course, it's worth remembering that "Overwatch," the giant that forced "LawBreakers" out of the ring, was a major success while promoting its own ideals of diversity (per Game Rant). Of course, Bleszinski also conceded that several other factors — including timing and platform exclusivity — also had a negative impact on the game.

The year is 2007 and the MMORPG genre is absolutely booming. "World of Warcraft" is breaking records with its first expansion, "World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade," while giants like "RuneScape" cultivated a long-term player base. Game developers were into the idea of producing a "WoW killer" a new MMORPG that would take the crown of the growing genre.

And so, Australian game developer Auran (now N3V Games) set out to make "Fury," a PvP-focused MMORPG. "Fury" set itself apart by focusing on PVP combat, but its release was met with negative reviews and the game never received an especially active player base (per MassivelyOP).

In an interview with GameSpot Australia, Auran CEO Tony Hilliam said, "Players hate losing, and ultimately Fury didn't have 200 hours of safe haven PvE environments where players could become comfortable with their character. The result was they came and they got beaten up, without really knowing why, and blamed the game for this (which is easier than blaming their lack of experience)."

While this explanation isn't too far out of the realm of possibilities, it does discount the fact that if fighting, learning, and losing in Fury was fun, then it probably wouldn't have flopped. And losing as a core game experience can be fun, as demonstrated by successful Roguelites and Souls-like games. At the end of the day, critics came down on the title for being unfairly punishing at times.

Based on "Superman: The Animated Series," "Superman 64" was an action-adventure game developed and produced for the Nintendo 64 by Titus Interactive. Released in 1999, "Superman 64" is often considered one of the worst games of all time due to its awkward controls, confusing objectives, and horrific visuals.

Even for its time, Superman 64 was exceptionally low-detail, which caused some characters to look like awkward and poorly-animated. However, the worst visual component of the game was its draw distance, which refers to how far from the player's point-of-view objects can appear. The draw distance in "Superman 64" was seemingly sacrificed in favor of other elements, making a flight through Metropolis a dangerous affair where skyscrapers can pop out of nothingness right in front of Superman. In an iconic choice, everything was enveloped in a sea of green fog.

To cover up this issue, the developers of "Superman 64" claimed that the lack of field-of-vision was a purposeful choice and that the green backdrop of Metropolis was "Kryptonite Fog" deployed by Lex Luthor in an attempt to destroy Superman (via IGN). Players didn't buy the hilarious excuse pretending to be in-game lore, and the game was seen as a failure.

Handheld consoles have a long history of amazing sales numbers, with Nintendo's Game Boy being an early example of that massive success in multiple markets. Sony attempted to recreate Nintendo's success with the PlayStation Portable (PSP), released in 2004. To a large extent, the company succeeded, as the PSP sold over 81 million units to date in 2022. Sony's follow-up to the PSP's mainstream success turned out to be less profitable. Much less profitable.

The PS Vita, released in 2012 and discontinued in 2015, lived a short and forgettable life plagued by multiple points of failure. But even though the console flopped in terms of unit sales, players of the PS Vita's games still believe it was an underrated console. And it didn't help that Nintendo had recently released the Nintendo 3DS when the Vita debuted, which overshadowed Sony's handheld and took the market by storm.

One of the main reasons that players found the PS Vita inaccessible is because they required specific proprietary memory cards instead of cheaper SD memory cards. Even when met by intense criticism, Sony defended its choice and insisted that the expensive proprietary memory cards were necessary for security (per Eurogamer).

"Overkill's The Walking Dead," Starbreeze Studios' main project between 2015-2018, was a nightmare throughout its production. A tell-all report from ex-employees (via Eurogamer) revealed there was a total lack of direction for the game. An entirely new engine (the Overkill Engine) was built and scrapped for the game due to its lack of basic functionality, and intense months-long crunch periods were entered in order to just ship the game to market.

Once the game flopped on its release, CEO Bo Andersson was fired as by the board of directors — and an email he sent to his staff the next day essentially placed the blame on his employees. "Personally though I lost all my money, my family in divorce and my kids custody through the toil over the last 2-3 years working 100 hour weeks for Starbreeze and keeping you devs paid and in the game," read the email. "With less and less developers willing to put in the extra care in a product it clearly limits the possible result of enough quality in time. This is a new era and I did not leave the old one and adapt in time – my fault."

The email was characterized as "ridiculous" by the people who worked on the game, with some feeling like Andersson refused to take any responsibility for the game's failure.