Some games just never stood a chance. These are the releases that crashed and burned the moment they hit shelves – hyped one day, forgotten the next. The stories behind them are equal parts tragic, hilarious, and kind of hard to look away from.
Some games don’t just stumble out of the gate – they vanish. A bad first impression, a broken build, a controversial design choice, or a launch-week disaster can kill momentum so fast that even big studios can’t spin it back. That’s what this list is about: releases that looked like they had a shot, then flatlined almost immediately.
We’ll break down the launches that lost the room immediately, from multiplayer hopefuls that couldn’t keep a crowd to big-name projects that got written off before word of mouth could even form. Curious to see more? Check out Part 1!
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum (2023)
Even diehard Tolkien fans have a breaking point, and this one found it by asking players to spend hours sneaking around as a clunky, bug-prone version of the character everybody loves to hate. The idea behind The Lord of the Rings: Gollum could’ve worked as a tense stealth adventure – dual personalities, desperate escapes, scrappy survival – but it showed up with ugly visuals, stiff animations, and gameplay that felt like it was punishing you for touching the controller. Reviews were savage, clips went viral for all the wrong reasons, and the game instantly became shorthand for “licensed doesn’t mean quality.” When the developers have to apologize publicly and promise fixes right out of the gate, the ship has already sailed… and in this case, it sailed straight into a rock.
Redfall (2023)
Nothing deflates a co-op night faster than realizing the “open world” is mostly empty streets, brain-dead enemies, and systems that feel like placeholders. Arkane tried to mash immersive-sim DNA into a looter shooter with vampires, guns, and a cursed Massachusetts island, but Redfall landed like a rough draft that somehow hit “ship.” AI routinely forgot how to fight, performance was messy, and the always-online setup made every hiccup feel twice as irritating. What really buried it was how quickly the chatter shifted from “it needs patches” to “this is fundamentally unfinished,” and the game never shook that reputation even after updates started rolling in.
Payday 3 (2023)
A heist game lives and dies on momentum, so launching with broken matchmaking is basically self-sabotage. Payday 3 arrived with that classic fantasy – mask up, coordinate, grab the loot, vanish – but the always-online infrastructure faceplanted hard enough that plenty of people spent launch week staring at error messages instead of bank vaults. Once players actually got in, the complaints kept stacking: missing quality-of-life features, a thinner-feeling package than expected, and progression decisions that didn’t reward the “one more run” loop the series is built on. You can patch a lot, but you can’t un-launch a first impression like that, especially when the whole point is playing together and the game couldn’t reliably let you.
Rainbow Six Extraction (2022)
Turning Siege’s tension into a co-op PvE spin-off sounds like an easy win – same gunplay, less sweat – but the result struggled to convince people it was a must-play instead of a curiosity. Rainbow Six Extraction had a cool hook with the alien “Archaean” outbreak and tactical operators, yet the missions started to feel samey once the novelty wore off, and the loop didn’t generate the kind of stories that keep a co-op game alive long-term. It didn’t crash like some spectacular disaster; it just slid out of the conversation while players drifted back to bigger, stickier multiplayer homes. When a game’s future becomes “maintenance and minor updates” energy, it’s basically the quiet version of dying instantly.
Babylon’s Fall (2022)
PlatinumGames making a stylish action RPG should’ve been a layup – flashy combat is their whole thing – yet this experiment turned into a cautionary tale about chasing live-service trends without a strong core. The game showed up with a muddy, washed-out art style, repetitive missions, and a loot grind that felt more like homework than a power fantasy. The player base of Babylon’s Fall collapsed almost immediately, the monetization looked embarrassing next to the lack of content, and the game’s “ongoing service” dream basically died in public. The brutal final note: support was cut so quickly that it barely had time to pretend it was a long-term platform, and it’s now remembered less as a game and more as a warning label.
Spellbreak (2020)
For a moment, dropping into a battle royale with nothing but gauntlets and raw elemental magic felt like the genre had finally found a fresh angle. Spellbreak nailed that “wizard duel at 100 mph” vibe – fire meets poison, ice walls cut off escapes, lightning finishes the panic sprint – and the early buzz made it look like a real contender. The problem was staying power: queues thinned, updates couldn’t keep the momentum, and the game slowly slid from “next big thing” to “oh yeah, that existed.” The end came quietly but decisively when Proletariat was folded into Epic, and the servers were shut down not long after.
Hyper Scape (2020)
A neon megacity built for vertical gunfights is an incredible pitch, especially when everyone’s bored of flat fields and the same old circles. Ubisoft tried to turn that into a new kind of shooter with fast movement, “hacks” instead of grenades, and a heavy Twitch-angle that felt designed to manufacture clips. But the reality was that the learning curve scared off casual players, balancing never found a stable groove, and interest collapsed before the game could grow a real identity. By the time Hyper Scape became a smoother experience, the crowd had already moved on – and Ubisoft eventually pulled the plug and shut it down.
Anthem (2019)
The cruel part is that the best version of this game exists in your head during the first flight: boosters screaming, waterfalls below, your suit cutting through storms like it belongs there. Then the loop sets in – repetitive missions, thin loot, grindy progression – and the magic starts leaking out fast. Anthem got hammered at launch for feeling unfinished where it mattered most, and instead of turning into a redemption story, it turned into a long public shrug. BioWare talked about a major rework (“Anthem Next”), but that plan was scrapped, leaving the game to limp along without the overhaul it clearly needed. It didn’t just die instantly; it stopped living almost immediately.
The Culling 2 (2018)
This is the kind of launch that makes you wonder if anyone involved ever watched a human being play their game before release. The original had a niche, tense survival vibe; the sequel arrived louder, clunkier, and somehow less fun in every direction, like it was speedrunning bad decisions. Backlash hit instantly, refunds became the only “feature” anyone talked about, and the whole thing got yanked from sale almost immediately – an all-time record for “what were they thinking?” energy. The Culling 2 didn’t fade out over months; it practically vanished on impact, leaving behind a reputation that still does more damage than any patch ever could.
Radical Heights (2018)
An ’80s game-show battle royale with prize wheels, cash pickups, and a cheesy host should’ve been so dumb it circled back into genius. What players got instead was a rushed early-access scramble that felt like it had been pushed out the door purely to catch a trend before it vanished. The gunplay was messy, the presentation couldn’t hide how unfinished everything was, and the whole thing came off like a studio trying to win a race it was already losing. Radical Heights wasn’t built to last – it was built to survive one more headline – and when Boss Key shut down soon after, the game basically evaporated with it.
Curious to see more? Check out Part 1!