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Failed Games That Damaged Or Killed Their Companies

Posted by Soulskill on from the cause-or-symptom dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Develop has an excellent piece up profiling a bunch of average to awful titles that flopped so hard they harmed or sunk their studio or publisher. The list includes Haze, Enter The Matrix, Hellgate: London, Daikatana, Tabula Rasa, and — of course — Duke Nukem Forever. 'Daikatana was finally released in June 2000, over two and a half years late. Gamers weren't convinced the wait was worth it. A buggy game with sidekicks (touted as an innovation) who more often caused you hindrance than helped ... achieved an average rating of 53. By this time, Eidos is believed to have invested over $25 million in the studio. And they called it a day. Eidos closed the Dallas Ion Storm office in 2001.'"

5 of 397 comments (clear)

  1. Enter the Matrix was OK... by SeeSp0tRun · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you consider crashing every 20 minutes, losing any save data you had, and having some video sequences prevent any further progress due to crashing.

    ...and that was on a console!

    --
    Something witty.
    1. Re:Enter the Matrix was OK... by Haymaker · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I have yet to find a movie based on a game that hasn't sucked.

  2. Whatever games companies produce... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    once EA buys them it's game over.

  3. VtM:B by lavaforge · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines was another game that killed the company. There's even an interview about it somewhere here on Slashdot.

    Apparently it went way over budget, was laden with game breaking bugs, and had copy protection problems.

    It's a shame, really, because the last 5 years of fan patching have made it kind of enjoyable.

    1. Re:VtM:B by Tobor+the+Eighth+Man · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Came here to post this very game.

      Troika was always an overly ambitious company. Their writing and setting development was top notch, but all their releases demonstrated an apparent lack of management oversight and nitty-gritty game programming/scripting expertise. Bloodlines is a great example: the first two and a half areas are brilliant, with rich characters and excellent writing and comparatively few bugs. It was among the best FPSRPGs I'd ever played.

      Then the rest of the game is increasingly a trainwreck, until the last level is just a silly run and gun through a repetitive skyscraper, which was so regressive in terms of design that it smacked of FPS games pre-Half-Life. Tons of stuff was obviously cut from the game, and it seems quite likely they had to rush it out the door to make deadline, with stuff unfinished.

      Arcanum had many of the same flaws as Bloodlines - stronger early game than endgame, cut or abandoned gameplay elements, bugs and a lack of fine-tuning - but on nowhere near the same scale.