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The business of video game development is a tough one, and sometimes one game's journey can end another's. This is a look at 10 titles that were responsible for killing off other video games.
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00:00Now, the business of video game development sure is a tough one, and considerably more
00:04secretive than, say, the world of movies or TV. As such, so many more games will be cancelled
00:10internally than we'll ever actually hear about. But when a high-profile project gets
00:14canned publicly, well, it certainly rubs fans the wrong way. But sometimes the reason is
00:19another video game itself, and that's what we're here to talk about today.
00:22As I'm Jules, this is WhatCulture.com, and these are 10 Video Games That Killed Other
00:27Video Games.
00:2810. Metal Gear Solid V The Phantom Pain Killed Silent Hills
00:32In August 2014, it was announced that a new Silent Hill game, Silent Hills, was in development
00:38at Konami, with Metal Gear Solid's Hideo Kojima collaborating with filmmaker Guillermo del
00:42Toro and actor Norman Reedus on the project. The moody, visually stunning playable teaser,
00:47also known as PT, that was released for the game got fans incredibly excited. But in April
00:522015, Konami abruptly announced that Silent Hills had been cancelled. It later transpired
00:57that the game was actually a casualty of the frayed relationship between Konami and Kojima,
01:01that reached a fever pitch during the development of Metal Gear Solid V The Phantom Pain, which
01:05ultimately released a few months after Silent Hills' cancellation. If you believe Konami,
01:09Kojima went over budget and over schedule on the project, while Kojima's supporters claimed
01:13that Konami forced him to effectively release an unfinished game. Either way, Metal Gear Solid
01:185 was the clear result of artistic compromise. And given that rumors emerged in March 2015 that
01:23Kojima would leave Konami once development on the game was finished, as he did, it's easy to draw a
01:28direct line to Silent Hills getting the chop the next month.
01:319. Among Us Killed Among Us 2
01:33A more light-hearted example now, with an original game proving successful enough that the developer
01:38simply decided to can their planned sequel and focus on supporting the existing game.
01:43Multiplayer social deduction game Among Us was first released back in June 2018, and though it
01:48didn't make much of a dent out of the gate, it became a social media phenomenon at the onset of
01:53the pandemic in early 2020. That August, developer InnerSloth announced that Among Us 2 was in the
01:58works, but just a month later they backtracked, revealing that the sequel had been cancelled due to
02:03the first game's unexpected success, with it becoming one of 2020's best-selling games on Steam.
02:08Instead of creating Among Us 2, they decided to focus on updating the original,
02:12namely rebuilding the game's dated codebase to allow for more ambitious gameplay elements.
02:17Given that Among Us has been a colossal cash cow for the company, InnerSloth was smart to keep
02:21supporting the existing version, which also generates microtransaction revenue through
02:25cosmetics, rather than rolling the dice on a sequel that may not have persuaded players to open their
02:29wallets again. Unlike most other games on this list, there are probably few fans that are upset
02:34that Among Us 2 never came to pass.
02:368. Epic Mickey 2 The Power of Two Killed Star Wars 1313
02:41Few cancelled video games have caused as much anguish as Star Wars 1313, a gritty story-driven
02:48title revolving around a young Boba Fett which was announced in 2012 by way of a gorgeous reveal
02:53trailer. Yet less than a year later, the game was announced to have been cancelled following
02:57Disney's acquisition of Lucasfilms, at which point all existing LucasArts video game projects
03:02were thrown away. One of the primary reasons for Disney's sweeping cancellations was the massive
03:06losses incurred by their own video game outfit, Disney Interactive Studios, which between 2008
03:12and 2013 lost a stonking $1.41 billion. And one of the studio's biggest flops of this period was
03:19Epic Mickey 2 The Power of Two, which released in 2012, mere months after Star Wars 1313 was announced,
03:25and sold barely 20% of what the first game did within its first month on the market.
03:30While Epic Mickey 2 obviously isn't solely to blame for such an outrageous loss,
03:33it was seemingly the straw that broke the camel's back. In a case of poor timing,
03:38it released just weeks after Disney acquired Lucasfilm, and was Disney Interactive Studios'
03:42last commercial flop before they shuttered Lucasfilm a few months later.
03:467. Hayes Killed TimeSplitters 4
03:48A fourth entry into the beloved FPS franchise TimeSplitters was first announced in August 2007,
03:54but after developer Free Radical went into administration and was bought out by Crytek in
03:592009, TimeSplitters 4 was put on hold and effectively cancelled. Though many assumed
04:04that Crytek either felt that the third TimeSplitters game Future Perfect didn't sell well
04:08enough, or they wanted Free Radical to work on their Crysis series, that's not actually why
04:12TimeSplitters 4 never materialised. The real reason? The catastrophic critical and commercial
04:17failure of Free Radical's last game 2008's Hayes, which had been hyped up as a halo killer in the
04:23media only to receive aggressively mediocre reviews for its generic FPS gameplay. Despite Free Radical
04:29shopping around a playable demo of TimeSplitters 4 to publishers before being acquired by Crytek,
04:34Hayes' failure had irreversibly tarnished their reputation in the industry, with all publishers
04:38passing on the game amid the belief that Free Radical couldn't deliver a commercial hit. And so,
04:43the failed ambition of Hayes is to blame for TimeSplitters never getting that fourth entry
04:48that so many fans assumed would be a sure thing. 6. Halo and Gears of War killed two Perfect Dark
04:55sequels Perfect Dark prequel Perfect Dark Zero was released as an Xbox 360 launch title in late
05:012005, and though it didn't set the world alight, Microsoft nevertheless gave Rare the go-ahead to
05:06begin work on not one, but two sequels, Perfect Dark Core and Perfect Dark Vengeance. Core was set to
05:12have protagonist Joanna Dark travel to Egypt, Russia, and then Saturn's largest moon, Titan,
05:16leading into Vengeance, which would tie up the planned trilogy story. Both games were set to
05:21feature parkour elements while drawing narrative influence from Deus Ex, but in 2007 the sequels
05:26were both cancelled by Microsoft. One of the motivating factors was Microsoft's belief that
05:31Perfect Dark Zero didn't sell enough, but the overarching rationale for scrapping two games,
05:35well that was to focus on other sci-fi franchises such as Halo and Gears of War, which were practically
05:41printing money at the time. Since then, a remaster of the original Nintendo 64 game was released for
05:46the Xbox 360 in 2010 to solid reviews, and a franchise reboot is apparently currently deep
05:51in development. 5. UDRAW Studio Killed THQ's The Avengers
05:56In 2010, THQ began development on a game based on Marvel's The Avengers, a co-op first-person
06:02brawler with third-person cinematic elements which would adapt the comics' iconic Secret Invasion
06:07storyline. However, the game, intended to be released in 2012, was cancelled in August 2011,
06:12when THQ closed down developers Studio Australia and Blue Tongue Entertainment. This happened because
06:18THQ had suffered catastrophic financial losses due to the release of the UDRAW game tablet and
06:23companion software UDRAW Studio the year prior. THQ invested heavily in UDRAW, believing that the
06:29art creation game would be the next big thing. But while it performed modestly well on the Wii,
06:33they ultimately vastly overestimated interest when bringing it to the PS3 and the Xbox 360 in 2011.
06:39In 2012, the company revealed that the UDRAW generated $100 million less revenue than projected,
06:45leaving THQ with a gigantic hole in their coffers, one that they plugged by shuttering the two
06:50aforementioned studios and consequently killing the Avengers game in the process. Quite a shame,
06:54really, because the leaked gameplay footage actually looked quite fun.
06:584. Overwatch 2 and Diablo 4 Killed StarCraft Ares
07:02In June 2019, it was revealed that Blizzard had cancelled a planned StarCraft FPS codenamed Ares,
07:08that had been in active development for two years at the time. Ares would have been the first FPS in
07:13the StarCraft series and had been likened to the Battlefield series, while being produced on the
07:18Overwatch engine. Though some within the company anonymously claimed that Ares was shaping up nicely,
07:23Blizzard ultimately cancelled it to prioritise new games in two of their most lucrative IPs.
07:28As it turned out, StarCraft Ares was canned in favour of Overwatch 2, which finally released last
07:33year, and Diablo 4, which awaits release this coming June. This was a doubly crushing blow for
07:38StarCraft fans, given that Blizzard have previously cancelled a hugely anticipated third-person shooter
07:43entry into the franchise, StarCraft Ghost. Evidently, with Blizzard doing precious little
07:47with StarCraft in recent years, it's clear where their priorities lie right now.
07:513. Call of Duty Killed Doom 4
07:54Long before 2016's quasi-reboot of Doom was released, Doom 4 was announced back in 2008,
08:00though word went suspiciously quiet on development in the years that followed.
08:04By 2013, a damning Kotaku report suggested that Doom 4 was trapped in development hell,
08:09while claiming that the original version of the game was a heavily scripted cinematic FPS
08:13in the vein of Call of Duty, enough so that it was given the mocking name of Call of Doom
08:17internally at id Software. This version of Doom was scrapped in 2011, after the game's creative
08:23lease decided that the vision had strayed too far from the Doom blueprint and, indeed,
08:27felt too much like Call of Duty. In a 2015 interview about the debacle, executive producer
08:33Marty Stratton said,
08:34When we sat down and went through what we really wanted, to make Doom the game that we thought
08:38that people wanted, fans wanted, and that we wanted to make, well, it didn't match.
08:42Subsequently released prototype footage showed just how closely the game hewed to the Call of
08:46Duty aesthetic and gameplay style, prompting development to be restarted entirely from scratch
08:50in 2011. Doom 4 was then retooled into what would become the well-received 2016 reboot,
08:56and the rest is bloody history.
08:582. Half-Life Alyx Killed in the Valley of the Gods
09:02After years of waiting for a follow-up to Half-Life 2 Episode 2, fans finally got their wish
09:07when the VR-exclusive title Half-Life Alyx was announced in 2019 and released the very next year
09:13to universal acclaim. Yet, its development came at an undeniable cost, as during the final stretch of
09:19Alyx's production, members of development team Campo Santo, which was acquired by Valve in 2018,
09:24were called in to assist. This took Campo Santo away from their own game In the Valley of Gods,
09:29which was unveiled with an intriguing teaser trailer in 2017, with the studio later confirming
09:34that it had been put on hold while they worked on Alyx. But with Alyx shipping in early 2020,
09:39production still hasn't resumed on In the Valley of Gods, and Campo Santo have instead been appointed
09:44to work on various other unannounced Valve projects. Needless to say, with more than
09:48five years passing since the game's original announcement and development still on ice,
09:52it's a pretty safe bet that Valve simply didn't see major value in the project and has quietly
09:56killed it.
09:571. Tron Evolution Killed Turok 2
10:012008's revival of the classic FPS Turok wasn't a great game by any means, but evidently sold
10:07decently enough that studio Propaganda Games got the green light from publisher Disney Interactive
10:11Studios to proceed with a sequel. But Turok 2 was cancelled in 2009, before it even had been
10:16officially announced. And though reports initially pointed to the 2008 economic crisis as primarily
10:22responsible, last year YouTuber Matt McMuscles interviewed Propaganda's former art director
10:26to get to the heart of the matter. They revealed that though the prototyping had begun on Turok 2,
10:31Propaganda was pulled from developing the game and moved on to Tron Evolution, a game greenlit by
10:36Disney to coincide with the release of the 2010 movie Tron Legacy. And once that game was completed,
10:41Disney then moved Propaganda to work on another game based on one of their most popular properties,
10:46Pirates of the Caribbean, Armada of the Damned. However, this game was never completed due to
10:51the critical and commercial failure of Tron Evolution, leading Disney to close Propaganda
10:55altogether in January 2011. As a result, Turok 2 died along with that studio, and the series hasn't
11:01seen a new entry since.