The 10 Worst Game Releases in Recent Memory

pcmag.com:

Releasing a big video game in the 21st century is a major undertaking. It can take millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of man-hours to complete, and it has a lot riding on it. The larger developers and publishers command armies of testers to pick through these titles like crazy before they ship.

So what makes a game launch badly, and why does it keep happening? A number of factors are at play. To identify them, we decided to get our hands dirty and dig up the most intensely botched game releases of the last decade and see what we could find out. Hold on: This could get ugly.

Expectations were extremely high for CD Projekt RED’s futuristic role-playing epic. The company had made its bones on the Witcher series of robust and immersive fantasy adventures, and it made a lot of big promises about its next franchise. Preview footage looked like a dream combination of GTA-style, open-world action fused with deep narrative and lots of impactful player choices. Unfortunately, what many players got when the game shipped in November 2020 was…compromised. The world of Night City was rough, especially on last-generation consoles, and some gamers even filed a class-action lawsuit claiming the company had misrepresented the product in trailers and previews.

Yuji Naka is a legend in the world of video games; he's the co-creator of Sonic the Hedgehog and a fountain of incredible ideas. When it was announced he was partnering with Square Enix to create an all-new platformer franchise, hopes ran extremely high. And then Balan Wonderworld came out and all the air was sucked out of the room. Its basic gimmick—your protagonist can switch between a staggering 80 different costumes, each with its own special ability—became a lot less