- 4 months ago
From broken launches to misguided live services, gaming has seen its share of disasters. Join us as we explore the biggest gaming disappointments that left players wanting refunds. From failed hero shooters to botched adaptations of beloved franchises, these releases taught us valuable lessons about what not to do in game development.
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00:00Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're looking at the absolute worst games that have been released
00:15from 2016 until 2025.
00:25Number 20. Scorn
00:30We haven't had a big new Alien game in a while, so people were initially excited to play Scorn,
00:40a survival horror taking its visual cues from the heart of H.R. Geiger.
00:45And admittedly, that art design is impeccable. It's so disturbing that at times it can make you
00:50sick to your stomach. Unfortunately, the gameplay didn't get as much love and attention.
00:55Scorn is too stingy with its ammo, and its puzzles are so obtuse, you can find yourself stuck
01:04for hours exploring areas of an alien locale that end up all looking the same.
01:09It undoubtedly would have been a better game if it took inspiration from Amnesia or Outlast
01:14and forced you to hide rather than fight back.
01:16Number 19.
01:27South Park Snow Day
01:29Now look kids, I know school's closed, but you should be at home doing remote learning.
01:33Just go get back home and we'll see you on Zoom, okay?
01:37After two top-tier South Park RPGs in The Stake of Truth and The Fractured But Whole, people
01:43were excited to hear that another South Park game was in development. Alas, that game was
01:47South Park Snow Day, which surprisingly was a 3D game and didn't replicate the show's iconic
01:53art style and gameplay. And by the way, that gameplay is third-person action combat, complete
01:58with melee weapons, range attacks, and acrobatic dodging. It also inexplicably had a season
02:14pass. Compared to the two RPGs, it's a clear downgrade where South Park video games are
02:19concerned since those games are both outstanding.
02:33Number 18.
02:34Redfall
02:45Almost single-handedly, Arkane revived the immersive sim for the 2010s with the critically
02:51acclaimed Dishonored series. Dishonored was followed up by Prey and Deathloop, neither
02:55of which reached Dishonored's lofty heights but are great gains nonetheless.
02:59But the studio took a huge blow in 2023 with the release of Redfall, a co-op FPS about hunting
03:06vampires. Gamers thought that it had the potential to be a Left 4 Dead for the 9th generation.
03:20But it wasn't clear if Microsoft thought it was, and it ended up being thoroughly lackluster.
03:25It was so lackluster, in fact, that Microsoft shut down Arkane Austin for good afterwards.
03:30Apparently, one failure means that one of gaming's best developers should have its entire second
03:35studio abolished.
03:40This series has been reliably popular since the first entry released on the DS in 2006.
04:03But Cookstar was nothing but problems. Things started looking dire when it was revealed publicly
04:09that it was going to use the blockchain to stop pirates, which led to accusations upon release
04:14that it was covertly using consoles to mine Bitcoin, unbeknownst to players.
04:20It's prompt removal from the Nintendo eShop fueled these rumors, though actually the game was pulled
04:31because the studio no longer had the license to the franchise. To be clear, the Bitcoin minor
04:36allegations were never proven, but the game was also just plain bad. Luckily, if you do want to play it,
04:42it was hastily rebranded as YumYung Cookstar and re-released.
04:4516. Skull Island Rise of Kong
05:06Who doesn't love a game-mill tie-in video game? Well, everyone, it turns out, because most of what the
05:12company publishes is notoriously bad. Like a modern-day LJN, Game Mill churns out licensed
05:18titles like they're going out of fashion, with the worst of the bunch being 2023 Skull Island Rise of Kong.
05:32With the same energy as Life of Black Tiger, the players roam through a mostly empty, bland world as
05:37King Kong. The situation gets worse when you look into it, though. Developer Iguanabe was allegedly
05:43asked to make the entire game in just 12 months, having crunch mandated to the studio by the head
05:48honchos at Game Mill producing one of the worst games of the 2020s so far.
05:5715. Multiverses
06:15There are plenty of good Warner Bros. games, the Arkham series and Injustice among them. Multiverses,
06:20however, was not the one. It was meant to bring together all of the IPs under the vast Warner Bros.
06:26umbrella in a fighting game that could compete with Smash. Except it absolutely couldn't.
06:42After a beta and a delay, it eventually launched in March 2024, but had only nine months to try and
06:49bring in a player base that could rival with Smash. Not easy considering Smash is an established franchise
06:55more than 20 years old. In January 2025, Warner announced that the game was a failure and that
07:00it would be taken offline on May 30th. That's a shame since it actually did gain some pretty dedicated
07:06players. 14. Warcraft 3 Reforged
07:20In 2004, Warcraft came out and promptly took over the entire world. After that,
07:35Blizzard abandoned the RTS gameplay that had made the original Warcraft games so beloved. That was
07:41until Warcraft 3 got a remaster in 2020, which the player base roundly hated. Activision apparently
07:48thought that remasters were pointless, so didn't give the small team working on Reforged said Blizzard
07:53the necessary resources, resulting in a game that was unfinished but also eroded the spirit of the
07:58original. It was extremely buggy and cumbersome, and Blizzard ended up giving anybody who asked a full refund.
08:14It wasn't until 2024 that the game would finally release Patch 2.0, which fixed some of the problems
08:20the game had. 13. Crackdown 3
08:36Some video game series manage to evolve with time and constantly reinvent themselves. Others languish for
08:42so long that when they finally release, they already feel ancient. Crackdown 3 was unfortunately a game just
08:48like that, playing like its Xbox 360 predecessor but in the year of 2019.
08:59All you can do is wipe out mobs of enemies, complete mindless objectives, and liberate areas of a large
09:05futuristic but forgettable map. It was a bland, uninspired, and bizarre relic of a game that maybe
09:11would have been just fine had it come out in 2012, but not any later.
09:2412. Skull & Bones
09:26A piece of vaporware nearly as infamous as Beyond Good and Evil 2, also allegedly being developed by Ubisoft,
09:38Skull & Bones finally set sail in February 2024. After a tumultuous development we don't have the
09:44time to get into here, it turned out that it was a real game after all, shedding its once-promised
09:50a single player to become a ship-based MMO, sort of.
09:59All you really do in Skull & Bones, which came out as a premium $70 game and was billed as a
10:05quadruple-A by Ubisoft, is sail around and collect resources until you have a big enough ship to engage
10:11with the smuggling mechanics that are also repetitive and extremely time-consuming.
10:2111. Anthem
10:32Another doomed life service, Anthem is a game that's even harder to enjoy than Skull & Bones,
10:38apparently conceived by EA as a potential destiny-killer, Bioware was ordered to make a new
10:44life service title that wasn't a Mass Effect or Dragon Age game. That game was Anthem, and it turned
10:49out to be a complete misfire.
10:5111. Back at the base. We can't let the scars get their little pinsters on that relic.
10:5611. I'll figure something out. I'll figure something out.
10:5812. Who's hit scars?
10:5912. Even the story, which is usually the best thing about a Bioware game,
11:06was bad, since it barely existed at all. Yeah, flying around in the javelin was fun,
11:11but not fun enough for anyone to stick around. Though Bioware wanted to keep updating Anthem
11:16to try and realize its potential, all work ended permanently in 2021.
11:2010. X-Defiant
11:36Ubisoft's other big life service game from 2024, X-Defiant hasn't fared nearly as well as Skull & Bones,
11:43getting itself shut down after only seven months on storefronts. Despite it being free-to-play,
11:48this crossover FPS just couldn't compete with something established like Warzone,
11:53and was such a disappointment that Ubisoft enacted yet another round of huge layoffs.
12:04Turns out that most dedicated COD players aren't interested in a COD killer. They're happy enough
12:09to just buy that new COD each year, or even just play Warzone for free. And who can honestly say that
12:15they're excited to see all of Ubisoft's biggest IPs interacting with each other? Very few people we imagine.
12:219. Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League
12:40Everybody was skeptical of Suicide Squad when it was revealed that it would be an always-online live
12:45service game supporting four-player co-op. You don't have to play the co-op, but you do have to be
12:50connected to the internet regardless. Upon hearing that the game had loot boxes,
12:54people were even more concerned, and they had every right to be.
13:06A far cry from the genre-defining action combat of the Arkham games, Suicide Squad had third-person
13:12shooter gameplay that barely felt different between each character. Rocksteady ended support for the
13:17game the following January, less than a year after release, but suffered ruthless layoffs during that
13:22time.
13:288. Babylon's Fall
13:37Very few studios can make a good Souls-like, and Platinum Games is apparently not one of them.
13:42You'd think that the brains behind Bayonetta and Nier Automata would be able to come up with something
13:47at least half-decent, but everything went wrong for Babylon's Fall. It felt uninspired and unpolished
13:53with terrible graphics and gameplay. Even the boss design, something Platinum Games usually does
13:58extremely well, was bland, and it was difficult to get any enjoyment out of it. Only a few thousand
14:04people were ever playing Babylon's Fall at a given time, despite being an ARPG with Square Enix behind it,
14:10and it's become a landmark flop for the company.
14:227. Metal Gear Survive
14:34It's no surprise that there hasn't been a new Metal Gear game since Metal Gear Survive.
14:39The first one in the series to not be overseen by Hideo Kojima after his unceremonious departure
14:44from Konami, Survive was a disaster.
14:54It was destined to fail from the beginning because fans were still so angry at Konami for how it
14:59treated Kojima, but then it failed on its own merits too. Filled with asset flipping and
15:04microtransactions, Metal Gear Survive was a disaster. It's no surprise that the franchise
15:09remained dormant for years and that it's only now coming back with remakes of the classic games
15:14Kojima oversaw.
15:266. Diablo Immortal
15:37It's never a good sign when people think your game announcement is an April fool's joke, especially when it didn't happen on April
15:44fool's day at all.
15:51It took 4 more years for the game to actually come out, and there were extensive alphas and betas beforehand to gather feedback.
15:58The problem with Diablo Immortal was that it was a mobile game, and Diablo's biggest fans just didn't want a mobile game.
16:04Though they'd only have to wait until the following year to get their hands on Diablo 4.
16:09After all that, it got mixed reviews, but was nowhere near the level of a full-fledged mainline Diablo.
16:15But hey, at least it didn't have an auction house.
16:175. Fast and Furious Crossroads
16:29Maybe you can have some fun with Fast and Furious Crossroads, but you'd have to be a
16:42die-hard fan of the movies and pay no more than $10 for it at the most.
16:47If you bought the game at launch, however, you definitely did pay more than $10, so you got extremely
16:52ripped off. With empty environments, boring tracks, and graphics about a decade out of date,
16:58even the hammy performances of the Fast and Furious cast, including Vin Diesel himself,
17:02can't make Crossroads enjoyable for more than 30 seconds at a time.
17:06Almost every other racing game is a better game than this.
17:09Even a car chase against a hovercraft can't save it.
17:214. Waifu Impact
17:32What if you could play Dead or Alive Extreme, but bad?
17:35Good news, you actually can.
17:37For only $5.99, Waifu Impact can be yours, and you too can enjoy running around a tropical island
17:43shooting your rival scantily-clad waifus with water guns. Yes, that's really all you do, except
17:48every so often a giant waifu appears and you have to shoot her too. It's the kind of game that feels
17:54like it was designed during a late-night dare between two developers and a bottle of cheap tequila.
17:58And yet, somehow, it sold well enough to justify a sequel, because of course it did.
18:03Waifu Impact is out now, presumably because Irony is dead and Thirst pays the bills.
18:093. Balan Wonderworld
18:27Sonic's had a lot of ups and downs recently, and sometimes it feels like he has two bad games for
18:32every good one. So when it was revealed that one of the creators of Sonic the Hedgehog was making a
18:37new project, people were pretty excited. Alas, the game they made was Balan Wonderworld,
18:43a platformer with almost no redeeming qualities.
18:463. Balan Wonderworld
18:55Though changing costumes to get different abilities is an interesting idea, it's absolutely not executed
19:01well, with many of the costumes being pointless or detrimental to the gameplay, with some of them
19:05not even being able to jump. The most you can expect when playing Balan Wonderworld is feeling
19:10bored. If you're not bored, you're extremely frustrated.
19:272. The Lord of the Rings Gollum
19:33When a video game focusing on Gollum was initially announced, we all wondered,
19:41why? Years after its release, and we're still wondering why. It was appalling by every metric.
19:47Broken, bleak, and boring.
19:54Certainly not a game worthy of one of Tolkien's most intriguing characters. That's despite the fact that
20:00it was delayed for 18 months. What were they doing for all that time? In response,
20:05Data Lake closed down its entire development arm, releasing a statement that was alleged to have
20:10been written by ChatGBT. This statement was also an apology after being accused of not paying those
20:15developers the minimum wage over in Germany, where the company is based.
20:19Hey! What kind of freak is that?
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20:411. Concord
20:51This may be the most expensive failure in video game history and the most embarrassing missteps
20:57Sony's video game branch has ever made. Allegedly, $400 million went down the drain when Concord was
21:04pulled from sale mere weeks into its lifespan, although some reports have said that this number
21:09is probably exaggerated. It was put into development in 2016 to capitalize on the success of Overwatch,
21:15arguably the biggest game in the world at the time. But when it finally emerged after 8 years,
21:20nobody wanted to play a premium hero shooter anymore.
21:29Even Overwatch itself had gone free to play. It just wasn't a game that anybody wanted,
21:34including Sony apparently, because you can't even play it anymore.
21:38Also, it is a pleasure flying the galaxy with you. Also, you do not stand a chance.
21:43And your name does not intimidate us!
21:45Were there any games on this list that you regretted buying and probably got a refund for?
21:49Let us know in the comments!
21:51Why don't we start with your name?
21:53Your real name. Not the one others have given you.
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