In the gaming industry there are too many games some of which are triple-A titles, and, of course, they should’ve been followed by many players. Unfortunately, many of them failed to keep the player base at a decent level, although their launch has been quite much anticipated.
No matter the game’s Genre, many have sinned in their intention to reach the top by not obeying the fans and their wishes. Having a healthy community is one, and a good developer is another thing. However, the both-sided feedback brings much of a value to any table concerning AAA games.
Let’s preview some of the overhyped video games that have managed to die just a couple of months after their release, thus lost their entire player base within a small period.
Destiny 2
Like it or not, we have to start with Destiny 2. Bungie managed to build up the hype among the players, even if they failed quite hard after the game has been released. The game’s excessive focus on DLCs been quite a deadly bullet to its game, regardless of the repetitive gameplay it offered. Together with it, Destiny 2 became nothing but a dead game in every player’s eyes.
Although the developer tried to moderately bring the game to a better level by promising and releasing further content, nothing exceptional has been added to the game, and after the first DLC, the player base went further down.
The Division
The Division is an older title that should still have a spot in this list, despite the excessive number of updates that Massive developed. Since the game’s launch, a lot of agents liked it. However, after a couple of days, a series of hackers appeared in its central PvP area, the Dark Zone.
Considering that the Dark Zone was the only and probably the best way of obtaining character’s upgrades back in the days, the cheater’s existence pretty much destroyed player’s intentions and pushed them, just said, out of the game rather than just enjoying the PvE content.
Even though its current state is quite healthy with a lesser amount of concurrent players and there’s a The Division 2, we felt like this title should’ve joined this list, as usual.
For Honor
Another game published by Ubisoft. It was the most iconic medieval title at the beginning of 2017, leading to countless of players at launch period. However, after a couple of days due to series connection issues, which was quite an aggravating factor primarily because of its “enhanced P2P connection” the frustration has built upon that and never ended.
Every single player criticized Ubisoft on their poor move allowing P2P connection to be a thing in 2017. Despite the fact that various of patches and updates tried to bring some of the already lost players, the game’s still somewhat at the same level as after missing the entire player base.
Just to make it clear, For Honor received Dedicated Servers too late, so even if the number of concurrent players has increased a bit, the early failure has left a mark among all players.
Call of Duty: WWII
It was supposed to be Sledgehammer’s triumphant return to the WWII. At first try, the game was smooth with some cool animations and fantastic combat system. After you pass the fundamentals, you discover the game has nothing to offer but a good periodically enjoying PVP content.
It led to a loss of a vast amount of player base. It is proven that lack of content destroys game’s player base, and nothing surprises the fact that this happened to COD: WWII as well. Having multiple factions and perks to choose is definitely good, but it seems that we go nowhere else but in a circle, which at the end of the day, awakens the bitter and boringness in the long run.
However, there’s a huge update to come to CoD: WWII, so it is left to see what is going to happen when it deploys.
No Man’s Sky
No Man’s Sky genuinely tried to impress the whole world with its quite good marketing. It looked quite amazing as players were put into a fantastic adventure where they could explore new planets and specials in the first-person perspective. However, the developers failed quite roughly to fulfill their promises.
The player’s frustration just kept on growing, as the game’s optimization was not at a reasonable level since its release, regardless of the repetitive and tedious content it offered. Those failures merely pushed the players out since the developer’s promises haven’t fixed any of the encountered and known issues.
The developers did put a lot of effort to bring some of the players back by releasing a significant amount of updates. Sadly, the players moved on since its failure, and as always, there’s another game that usually takes place upon that one that has failed in their eyes.
Sea of Thieves
It’s quite a newer title that has somehow brought in an excessive amount of players. During its first two Beta phases, don’t get me wrong, the game was quite exciting to play. It offered a right amount of content (at first look). Sadly, after the launch remained pretty much the same. Players completely missed the immersive game they were promised to game.
The failure of balancing between the PvE and PvP gameplay also had a significant impact on the player base. Only said, there wasn’t any system to make the players indulge into, regardless of the quest system. There was nothing like perks system, levels, upgrades, etc. All that the game had were the cosmetics which were merely unnecessary to buy.
We know that lack of content pretty much kills games, and this is what exactly happened with Sea of Thieves as well. Rare has promised that rifle upgrades will become a thing, but still, it’s too little too late.
Conclusion
There are more games that suffered the same issue. There will be even more to come out and fail throughout their journey and development course. Having that at the table brings nothing but a whole lot of disappointment in player’s eyes on future AAA projects.
There’s a HUGE difference between not living up to hype/expectations and “dropping dead”. LawBreakers is a much, much, much better example of a game that “dropped dead” and “failed”. When a game like D2 or COD WWII sells 5-10 million copies, it’s pretty ridiculous to say it “failed”. As for NMS and SoT, those 2 games are likely on similar paths. SoT, like NMS, will become a much better game over the next year, through added content and improvements based on feedback from the community. SoT has already gone through some changes after the first update.