Seven MASSIVE Video Game Industry Blunders and Fails from 2024

If you’ve heard people laughing at the idea of a “Quadruple A” quality title, Ubisoft is to blame. Releasing in 2024, Skull and Bones only reached a catastrophic 2,581 players at its peak on Steam. The “Quadruple A” bit comes from a call between Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot and investors in 2024 before its release, in response to a critique of the game's 70$ price tag. “It’s a very big game, and we feel that people will really see how vast and complete that game is. It’s a really full, triple… quadruple-A game, that will deliver in the long run.”

While most sources cite the game to have cost $200 million dollars, some rumors have set a potential price tag way higher. Combined with Star Wars Outlaws falling short of Ubisoft’s expectations, and having to delay Assassins Creed Shadows, it seems like Ubisoft’s overconfidence has come back to bite them.

Despite releasing what some reviews call Destiny’s best expansion yet- Bungie’s Final Shape DLC for Destiny 2 is set to underperform, selling less than their previous expansion Lightfall- which was received as one of Bungie’s worst. Furthermore, another Sony-owned studio, Rocksteady, made its own attempt at a live-service game set in the beloved Arkham universe. Today, the game Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League averages less than 200 active players.

Suicide Squad reportedly has cost Warner Bros. at least 200 Million Dollars, and the community reception to the game was less than stellar to the studio for killing off some of their characters in a way that felt disrespectful, especially to the iconic caped crusader. Rocksteady then had to backpedal, saying that most of the characters who were killed off were merely clones- but now, these studios have left a sour taste in the mouths of once loyal fans.

What do the two award-winning games from the Prey series, the critically acclaimed award-winning game Hi-Fi Rush, and a small Doom mobile game spin-off have in common?

Microsoft shut down all the studios that produced them in the same week, leaving fans of the studios shocked and bewildered. Sure, Arkane Austin may have been responsible for the disaster that was Redfall from last year- but Hi-Fi Rush had an enthusiastic fanbase, and its developer Tango Gameworks even won Best Audio Design at the Game Awards. The day following Tango’s closure, the head of Xbox Game Studios Matt Booty even said, “We need smaller games that give us prestige and awards.” Talk about pouring salt in the wound, closing the small studio that just produced one of the most talked about games in the same year as hits like Baldurs Gate 3, and Tears of the Kingdom.

No game expo was ever as big as E3- It's the biggest name in gaming announcements. Every year, eyes and ears would turn to E3 for announcements such as the next generation of consoles, and the latest in gaming.

But E3 has been notably absent for the past two years- and hasn't had an in-person event since 2019. Before the pandemic. Its last show altogether was in 2021, and was held online- but just before the beginning of 2024, it was confirmed that the show would be its last. 2024 is the first year where nobody will be looking and waiting for an E3- leaving it forever in the past as a part of video game history.

There’s one live service Sony game I didn’t mention with Destiny and Suicide Squad- and that’s because it's Concord. Undoubtedly, Concord is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, flops of this decade. The game was pulled from sale two weeks after its release, reportedly costing Sony $400 million to make, and likely much more as failed preparation for the game’s marketing and success began to trail out- such as branded controllers, and the Concord episode in Amazon’s upcoming "Secret Level" series. Playstation would go on to refund all sold copies of the game- which was estimated to be only around 25,000 copies.

Following the failure, creative director Ryan Ellis has stepped down at Firewalk while the studio awaits Sony’s judgment.

This one, I saved for last because it hits hardest for me, personally. Video game history is so fleeting, and preserving it is incredibly important. Nothing could represent that better than GameStop suddenly shutting down its 33-year-long run of GameInformer, and removing everything about it from the internet.

A historic and impactful magazine, GameInformer was the longest-running video game magazine in the states- and it wasn't shut down from the inside, it was shut down by higherups at its parent company, GameStop. Its webpages, its social media, and any publically accessible issues are now gone unless they were saved and archived- as fans race to try and preserve any history they can.