Video Gamers Podcast - The Biggest Flops in Gaming History – Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: July 28, 2026

Gaming hosts Josh, Ryan and Ace are diving into some of gaming’s biggest flops to figure out why they crashed and burned. From overhyped launches to costly mistakes, we break down what went wrong, what could have been saved, and whether any of these games deserved a second chance. (if they are even still available) If you love video games and the stories behind spectacular failures, this is one gaming conversation you won’t want to miss. Join us for another gaming-filled episode of the Video Gamers Podcast celebrating the wild side of video games!   Thanks to our MYTHIC Supporters: Redletter, Disratory, Ol’ Jake, Gaius, Jigglepuf, Phelps and NorwegianGreaser, Dettmarp and NightWizard63   Thanks to our Legendary Supporters: HypnoticPyro, PeopleWonder, Bobby S.   Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/videogamerspod⁠ Join our Gaming Community: https://discord.gg/h2cHKAvSmu Follow us on Instagram:⁠ https://www.instagram.com/videogamerspod/⁠  Follow us on X:⁠ https://twitter.com/VideoGamersPod⁠  Subscribe to us on YouTube:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@VideoGamersPod?sub_confirmation=1⁠    Visit us on the web:⁠https://videogamerspod.com/⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, fellow gamers, and welcome to the Video Gamers podcast. Many games in the world go unnoticed and disappear into quiet obscurity. However, occasionally a game fails so spectacularly that the world knows about it. What causes them to flop? Was it poor development, an oversaturated market, or did they just plain suck? Well, on today's episode, we're going to be breaking down some of gaming's biggest flops, discuss what happened and why they made the list no studio ever wants to be on. Before we get to the epic failures, some introductions are in order.

I am your host Josh. And joining me, he's never met a good game trailer that ever steered him wrong. Well, except most of the games on today's episode, it's Ryan. We know I'm easily excitable. It's not my fault. it's a condition call 1-800 excitable

they'll take care you to be fair all of these games had pretty good trailers to them they were I'm like I'm in I'm in baby

yeah there was a reason to get excited about all of these games I mean I don't remember I'll be honest I don't know

listen listen I volunteered to take more of these games than you two stooges because, you know, that's what I do. And now I have forgotten, I have forgotten what games you guys have, to be honest. So I only know the games that I did my research on. And so it'll come as a surprise to me what the other games are. Even though we all came up with this list together. Yeah, well, there you go.

And joining us. He believes there's no such thing in the. indie world is a flop, just learning experiences. But AAAs deserve it when they flop, and he's here to tell us why it's ace. That's darn tooting, buddy.

It's funny because it's true. It's funny because it's true. It's not even deny it, man. It's a learning experience, right? It's you got to get your toes wet when you're in the indie world. Yeah. But you're just learning how to develop in the AAA world. That was

a $1.2 billion dollar game. Oh, man. There's, there's some mighty expensive flops. Oh, yeah. That we're going to be talking about. Before we get to the bad news and the gaming flops, guys, what's the opposite of a flop? Like a success? I say it's a success or a win.

Success story? Well, we're going to talk about a few wins. I like that, Ace wins. We're going to talk about a few wins because we've got some more people to thank. guys the community the listeners have stepped up the game dude i i like honestly this is just humbling man uh people people have been answering the call uh that we have put out there to support the show this might also have something to do with the wanting to hijack all of us uh to make us play games which we do have an update on but before we get to that we want to thank some people so a huge

shout out to juna uh for signing up for rare status we we had a uh in person guest together the first annual VGP get together the other night, Ryan, which was an absolute blast. Jayuna was trying to make it, didn't make it, but we had a really good time. But Jayuna, thank you for signing up for a rare status. Thank you. Thank you. I had a great time too. This next one.

This next one. Guys, we have a new supporter by the name of Baldbeard. Oh. Yeah, Baldbeard, the pirate making his appearance in the supporters, in the supporters. in the supporters of the show. So Baldbeard, the pirate, making an appearance, signed up for rare status. Oh, my God.

I concede. I concede everybody. Baldbeard is a great name for me. If I was a pirate, that will be my moniker at this point. You've got exactly one supporter in your court, so I think we won. Yeah.

I, man, I accept. I said if the people say it's a good name, it's a good name, the people came out and they said, that's a great name. And so it's a great name. He hates it so much. He hates it so much.

And then AJ Thompson, AJ Thompson signing up for rare status. Thank you, AJ. And then guys, the one, the only Sully. So Sully came into the community as a rare member. Sully upped his support for the show to epic status,

which is huge. That's a huge help for us. And then not only that, but Sully went, Sully just became Santa Claus and started just give it away, games to the community. Uh, I think at this point, it's a couple copies of Pal world.

Um, and then a copy of Tito. Yeah. And now they have another game that they're given away. Uh, so Sully, thank you, man, for just absolutely blessing the community with a bunch of games. Thank you for blessing this podcast with your epic level of support. Santa Claus or Oprah. One of the two. Yeah.

You get a game. You get a game. You get a game. I mean, we're not complaining, man. That's why we say this community is freaking awesome. And then out of nowhere, out of the blue, we get a new legendary supporter of the show. This is the highest tier that we offer that somebody can support going above and beyond to bring this podcast to the world. The Milkman cometh.

Dude, Milkman signed up for legendary status. So thank you so much, Milkman for going legendary. Yeah, Milkman. Thank you. Thank you. All right. And as promised an update. All three of us

are forced to play a game. Yep. Now we are. The goal was five new signups hijacked one of us. Then it was, hey, if we get 15,

can we hijack all of you? More than 15 people signed up at this point. So all of us are playing a game. We know two of them with pretty significant certainty. Ace has to play much against his will because I've never.

ever seen a grown man whining complain so much, but Ace is getting forced into playing GTA 5, which Ryan and I are 100% on board for. And Ace is just like, nah. So

Ace, got to play GTA 5. Ace, it's okay. It's okay to admit if you are not looking forward to this, but also Ryan and I can rightfully so call you an idiot for thinking that GTA5 is not going to be a game.

Oh my. Oh, here it comes. Here it comes. It's Red Dead all over again. Red Dead, I already kind of knew it was going to be good, and I knew the story was something worthwhile. And how do you not know? It's going to be good. Yeah, exactly.

It's the same developer ace. It doesn't take place in the West. It takes place in our modern, boring era. You were going to eat your words. You're going to eat your words. You're going to say, Trevor is one of my top five characters of all time. Like, that's what's going to happen. I doubt that, but we'll see.

And then you'll realize. why I picked Trevor to do a night out on the town with in one of our drafts because you're going to have a good time. You're going to wind up in jail or dead. You're going to wind up in jail or dead. But you were going to have one of the best nights of your life. That's all I'm saying. Like, this is pretty locked in for me. It's going to be uncharted four. I've never played any of the uncharted games. I will say that I did my homework, kind of just assuming that this would be the game for me. I did watch the recaps for one through three. smart.

I may have seven hours into Uncharted 4 already that I'm not going to talk about because I have some thoughts already. So, but I have been playing that. And Ryan, you're just like in normal life. You're the, you're the unknown for this podcast. We got no idea right now. We think it's going to be Mass Effect too. We're pretty sure.

And that makes me very happy. Like out of all the games that. Yeah. Yeah. It's in the lead by a decent margin. So unless there's some late. rally. Ryan's going to be playing Mass Effect 2. Kind of like I did with Uncharted, he'll watch a full spoiler recap of Mass Effect so that he knows what's going on in Mass Effect 2.

But if you're going to play a Mass Effect game at this day and age, like Mass Effect 2 would be my choice as well. So I think the, I think the community was smart to vote for that for you. Celeste was the number 2 for you. It's Celeste in Mass Effect 1 or like in the other. Yeah. I kind of agree that I don't know. Like, I worry. that if we started Ryan on Mass Effect 1, he would be like, this just feels really old and dated to me. You know? And then, so there is something to be said for saying,

like, hey, why don't you experience the best one in the series? And if you really like it, then go back and experience the other ones. I'm pretty sure you get like a recap. Anyway, so you should be fine. Yeah, yeah, it's not hard. It's not hard to get anything spoiled for you or recapped for you on the internet these days.

Yeah, right. It's pretty easy. All right. Well, that's it for the housekeeping. Guys, let's get into our game. flaming flops. Now, I just want to start off by saying, we're going to be talking about these. We are going to be giving some insight into why they flopped.

We are not celebrating failure. Like, one of the things that we have always said on this podcast is, Ace is like, maybe just a tiny bit. One of these absolutely deserved it. So yeah. Yeah, I mean, to be fair, there's some bad decisions that were made. Like, all of there, there is information. And we did some research on these people.

So like we actually put in some work to find out what happened with these games But we don't ever wish for a game to fail It is one of my pet peeves on the internet to see people actively rooting for failure We saw this with High Guard Yeah you know it's like like dude just let people enjoy games Just because you don't like a game doesn't mean that you have to make somebody else not like a game And we've seen this more and more lately where people especially online on social media Start rooting for a game to fail or actively trying to make a game

it fail with speaking out against it or whatever. That is lame, in my opinion. You know, if you don't like a game, that's fine. We don't like plenty of games, but we also don't go around telling everybody else you should hate this game. And so we're not celebrating the failure of these games, but we are saying, hey, there are definitive reasons why these games failed. And hopefully there's some lessons to be learned from these. And we're going to get into all that right now. So the games we are covering. Concord, the most famous video game failure in history, if you ask me. This is the one we all know about, but you may not know why it was doomed to failure from the start.

So we're going to break that down for you. Ryan's favorite game, he thought he was going to get away without me mentioning anything about this. But Redfall, Redfall was a colossal failure from a beloved studio. Quality trailer. Really good trailer, I'll tell you that much. Really, really quality trailer that really roped Ryan in there. What a trailer. Marathon.

You know, here's one. We tried to cover a spread, right, of like historic games, most well-known failure. You know, one, a game that people didn't expect to fail. And then a current game that in all arguments is failing. You know, you might can say, hey, it's too early to say that marathon's a flop, but it's kind of a flop. And we're seeing it happen in real time. So we wanted to talk about marathon. And then Ryan and Ace, like I said, I forgot what two games you guys are covering.

Actually, I just remembered Ace. You're doing skull and bones. Oh, yeah. First quadruple A game ever, man. Ever. Self proclaimed by Ubisoft. By the developers. You guys are saying it like it's not.

It's Ubisoft. What do you mean, Ace? Are you arguing against Ubisoft? Who do you think you are? No, no. I'm just here to talk about their first quadruple a game and their long lineup of quadruple A games. And then, Ryan, what is the game that you are going to be talking about? Well, it's one when you're in a galaxy far, far away.

We're going with the one, the only Star Wars outlaws. A lot of money was put into this game, a lot of time, a lot of developers. and I'm very excited to talk about kind of what happened in the numbers that, you know, followed. That one's also... This one, right? Yeah. Yeah, this was really soft.

This one's a Vesoft as well. So, they're doing well. We didn't do that intentionally. I'll be honest, the reason that we picked Star Wars Outlaws is because this is one of those games that is considered a flop by the company, but a lot of gamers that played this game actually went, dude, there's actually a pretty decent game here.

We were hijacked. to play Star Wars Outlaws by Disritory, who was championing this game from release and saying, I don't understand the internet hate. The internet would have you believe that this game is absolute garbage. And he said, and I want to prove that that's not the case. He hijacked us to play it. And we, Ryan and myself both,

went, this is actually a pretty good video game. You know, like this does not deserve the hate that it's getting from the internet. but then that internet hate might have affected the outcome of this game. So this is why we picked Outlaws to say, hey, here's an example of a game that by all accounts flopped, but is actually a pretty decent game at the same time just to give some perspective. So I'll tell you what, since we're talking about it already, let's start with Star Wars Outlaws, Ryan.

Perfect. I liked this game. Did you like this game? I love this game. I know you missed in Dissertory. getting us to play this thing. I thought that this game was so underappreciated in the Star Wars universe. It is a beautiful world.

The gameplay is fantastic. The air flight is awesome. The speeder battles are great. The little cities that you go through are fleshed out and full of life. There's always something around every corner. There's secrets. There's objectives. there's unlockables.

It has everything you would want, especially, you know, in the Ubisoft game, you know they're going to put everything in there for good or bad, but it was all in there. I just think, I honestly don't know. One, I don't know what the

issue is to why it failed, but two, why it also cost them so much money. Like, they spent a lot of money making this game. The IP alone probably cost them enough money. I don't know what the actual IP cost is for them, but I know the estimated total cost to develop this game is between $2 to $300 million.

$2 to $300 million. That's a lot. That's a lot, dude. Now, that is development plus marketing plus the Star Wars licensing. So this is the total cost for Ubisoft to develop this game. Largest ever for Ubisoft, largest one they've ever had. didn't this game have like an abysmal launch? Like it was buggy as all get out?

Um, I don't know about super buggy. I think it did have some bugs on this. It was just considered like a soft launch. It wasn't like this game was an absolute flop right off the bat. I just remember hearing like there was a huge like soft lock spot where they had to immediately throw out a patch like within hours to fix it. Oh, maybe. I don't remember that.

I don't remember that. And we played it like right away. But I mean, that could be the case. I didn't see that when I was looking up stuff about it. But I definitely know that it definitely got a lot of instant hate. You know, if there's one crew in the world, Star Wars fans are very particular on what they get and how they take everything in. And apparently, Ubisoft did not meet the bar and not do what they should have done because it was not received well. I would say it already had a foot in the grave when it was coming out because it was being developed by Ubisoft.

And there's this thing I call Ubisoft fatigue where people are just like they know what Ubisoft's going to put out. And even if Ubisoft gets your favorite IP, you know what you're getting from them. And you may just be like, it's going to suck because it's Ubisoft right off the bat. Yeah. Yeah. Well, what's crazy about Star Wars outlaws is Ubisoft intentionally paired back on this one. They said, hey, we're going for a more crafted experience. If you remember them giving these buzzwords, right?

It's like, hey, this is the Star Wars. Wars universe. We're going to do it justice. We're pairing the experience back so that you don't have 5,000 map markers and icons and stuff like that. Some of the issues that launched since we were just talking about that were, you're right, there were bugs. Apparently there was one that was severe enough to require restarts or to affect progress. You never want to have to have somebody like load an old save to fix a box. That's huge. AI issues. Now this makes me laugh because the footnote on this one is inaccurate stormtroopers. I don't know if people don't know the lore of Star Wars, but stormtroopers are inaccurate

anyway. The stealth wasn't very good. The combat was kind of mid. Like there were some launch issues for this. One of the big no-noes that they did on this, and we just talked about this a few weeks ago, was this is one of the first games that launched with gated content as an available day one DLC. And so I think gamers were pretty peeved about that because it's like you literally made the game

and then you chopped part of it out to try to sell me a like a day one DLC, you know, upcharge micro transaction kind of thing there. And then, you know, in the beginning people were kind of complaining because it is an open world. I'll say this, dude. I think Star Wars Outlaws is one of the best representations of the. Star Wars universe that doesn't include Sith and Jedi and superstar destroyers

and like the really, really fantastical stuff. It is an awesome glimpse into like the everyday life in the Star Wars universe. And I think they did a really good job with that. And I think some of that got lost in some of these other issues. And then of course there was the internet hate in the internet debate about the main protagonist, KVess. I remember that part.

And this is where things get stupid. right because like dude the internet noise sometimes is infuriating to me because the internet lost its mind that they said well hey kv s is ugly yeah kv s is ugly why didn't you have a good looking protagonist and this sparked a huge internet debate and so this is this is an example and mind you that sometimes the smallest group is the loudest group so this isn't indicative of a large percentage of people but there were people that were screaming on online enough to get noticed that said that this protagonist was ugly, that this was a DEI type inclusion in the game. And like, that just doesn't make any sense to me, man. Like, she's a scoundrel.

If you play the game, she's literally like a scoundrel. Scoundrels in Star Wars are always, like, gritty and like homely. And like, I just, this, this is, this is where internet noise, I think, actually did in some fashion or some way affect the launch of a game. Yeah. And it's just dumb because you had people that were actively rooting for this game to fail before it ever even released. Ruding for it to fail because of that is so stupid. Are they right?

Like, is she not very attractive? Well, yeah. Like, she's not a bad thing. There's a lot of characters and a lot of video games that aren't like super buff or beautiful or all those things. but that doesn't make like the game unplayable or not okay and then to just involve

your personal beliefs and stuff to scream to the masses you know it's the internet do what you want to do but I think it is stupid are they right that she's not attractive yeah but that's shit I mean it's no it's true she's not it's true she's not like Josh said she's a scoundrel

like she's not and and you know you can take with that what you will and whether it was intentional or not I don't make me attracted to my video game characters to enjoy their games. No, but there is something to where I do believe, like, I'm here to disassociate from the world. I'm here to, I want to see fantastical, amazing things. I don't look at a magazine of supermodels to see regular people. I look to see the best of the best, the most beautiful. And when I play a video game, like, give me some amazing, beautiful or ripped character.

Like, I don't want my superheroes to be string beans. and equally so with this. But that doesn't mean that the game can't be good and doesn't mean that it's not a playable. And I absolutely love this game. I thought it was fantastic. I thought the world was amazing. I thought everything about it was great.

I think they spent way too much money developing it. I don't know how they spent that much money. I mean, they had a development staff of like hundreds and hundreds of people, and it took them four to five years. four and a half years to make this thing. And they did not sell even close to what they wanted to within the first month. It was only looking like a million copies within the first month on a $200 million game. That's not going to pay the bills.

Yeah, no. So undeserved flop if you guys were to say. Yeah, I would say undeserved. If you played the game, if you played the game, it was a good game. Now, it's not, we're not saying it's a 10 out of 10 and 9 out of 10, but it was a, it was an enjoyable game in a Star Wars universe, it was well done for the Star Wars IP, which a lot of people were craving. This one didn't deserve to flop, in my opinion. Like, this is one where it's like, out of all the games that we're going to talk about, this is probably the game that least

deserved to flop at all these. But the internet is a mean place. And I do attribute some of the results of Star Wars outlaws to the internet reception on this one. And gamers actively being hostile against people that wanted to play this game and then review bombing it and coming out of the woodwork and saying you shouldn't play this game and things like that. So all right, we're going to have to speed up a little bit here because we've got a lot of games to cover on this one. I had a lot to say, I guess.

Yeah. We don't have to spend a ton of time on Concord because most people know about Concord. Okay, if you do not know about Concord. Okay, Concord was Sony's big hero shooter. This was the game that Sony said, this is our, this is our cash cow. This is going to be our Overwatch. This is going to be the game that makes us millions and millions and millions of dollars every single year or, or, you know, quarter of each year.

Some fun facts. Do you know that development on Concord started in 2016? Oh, gosh. Do you know what, do you know what Hero Shooter released in 2016? Oh, gee, I don't know. Oh, watch. could it be the one and only Overwatch.

Guys, guys, look at this game that released that's selling like gangbusters. I wonder if we should copy this game. Sure, sure. Let's copy it, guys. Okay,

eight years later, eight years later, they finally went Concord's ready, guys. You think the market's still going to be the same? Like, no. They weren't $40 for Concord. Part of what got Concord,

the money to get developed, was it was developed by ex-Bungy and Activision veterans. So anytime you hear bungee, right, you think, ooh, good shooters. Not anymore. You used to. You used to. We're going to be talking about another bungee game on this episode, and that's Marathon here in a little bit.

So Sony actually bought the studio, Firewalk Studios. That's who developed Concord. They bought the studio in 2023. So a year before Concord was getting ready to release. That was a bad move, Sony. That was a real bad move. dumb thing you did. You know, so at this point, you know, it took eight years of development.

At this, at the time that it released in 2024, the hero shooter market was saturated, right? And you had Valerance. You had Apex Legends. You had Overwatch. At this point, we had Overwatch, too. You have games like Rainbow Sixth Siege. You had the Overwatch knockoff of Paladins, even X-Difiant, which is now defunct. You could consider that game a flop.

but X-Difiant had different classes and it wasn't really a pure hero shooter but you know, I had the same elements. What did most of those shooters have in common though? They were all free to play. Exactly. And then Concord released with a $40 price tag in a market that was absolutely dominated

by free to play games. And then you had the issue of it just kind of sucked. I was one of the people that played the beta of Concord. I remember being very excited for this game. I remember thinking, oh goodness, a Sony led triple A hero shooter. This is going to be awesome. And then I remember playing the beta for probably a good four or five hours and then walking away going, this game is not awesome.

It doesn't feel right. It doesn't. The speed isn't right. The characters aren't remarkable. There were a few neat abilities, but I just remember walking away going, guys, this does not feel like the game that they are hyping it up to be. I was not the only one. The response to Concord was terrible.

Most of the criticisms were it felt very genetic. Genetic. It was very forgettable characters. None of them were memorable. They didn't have a lot of lore behind them. The maps weren't anything to write home about. And it honestly just felt a little slow and dated at that point. Nothing.

Nothing about Concord felt amazing. Are you telling me this wasn't a game that was worth investing almost $400 million? into? No. The high end is $400 million. The confirmed low end is $200 million.

So at least $200 million. And that's just the game. Sony had big plans for Concord. Oh, they had huge plans for this. They were going to make this their next big IP. They were going to make like a TV show. They were going to do a movie. They had all these great ideas that they were going to do for Concord

because they were going to make this their Star Wars. Yeah, basically. They had to have at least, You know, with all this and all the money, hundreds of millions of dollars spent. Like, they had to have, like, a really good, like, launch and, like, at least a peak, like, with the hype, the concurrent players. Oh, kind of like any game launches to concurrent players. Yeah, the concurrent players. It may be kind of.

Ryan, check the concurrent player count of Concord. Oh, wait. Hold on. Yeah. It's zero. Oh, it's zero. Okay. And what's the all-time peak?

Uh, guys, this is where it gets really, really bad. Interesting. This is where it gets really bad. Concord flopped so hard that it sold 25,000 copies total. Now, at 40 bucks a pop, that's $1 million, guys. $1 million in sales. And it costs anywhere from $200 million to $400 million to make. And it grossed $1 million in sales.

The concurrent player count on Steam, the highest concurrent player count was 700 people. Yikes. 697 man that's that's that's that's so like you could just like you could just round people up and just pay everybody so much some money and and and you could have more than that it's insane that your beta is that poorly received and you decide to launch the game anyway that's on you like that is yeah no that's true so people go where did the development go so wrong right and part of this is is that number one it was an eight year development cycle that's too long especially

in a genre like, you know, that Overwatch just released into and was the king of the genre. And I get wanting to chase that carrot, but sometimes you go, guys, it's great. It's great that they hit this. But if you if it's going to take you eight years to make a game, you can't, you can't assume that that market

or that genre is still going to be the same by the time it's done. There was also, like, honestly, Bethesda's a good example. Like Starfield, dude. You know, like Starfield's not a bad game, but it is not the game that people wanted as the next greatest IP from Bethesda.

And I think you're starting to see this happen a lot more with these long development cycles. There was also some issues with, this is kind of interesting news, where it was toxic positivity in the, in the studio. So basically they were so excited to make this game that nobody could say no. Nobody could say, hey, this character sucks or this map sucks. Any kind of criticism was met, like was just discouraged. And if you don't have people that are going, hey, I don't think this is working.

man, we need to mix this up or change this. This is what you get. You get a game that just shocks everybody. Now, we just saw this with High Guard. Yeah. Okay? Like, if you remember, the High Guard devs came out and they said, guys, we had no idea that this was going to be received so poorly because nobody said

anything bad. You know what I mean? Like nobody told us that this wasn't good. Everybody was just patting each other on the back. And so that's not good. You have to have honest feedback. So yeah, so the outcome of all of this with Concord, the studio was shut down two weeks. Two weeks after launch.

The entire studio was shut down. Sony gave out full refunds for anybody that had purchased Concord so that one million dollars in sales was not a million dollars in sales. They ate everything on this one. I wonder what they lost on that. Like the total between like hundreds of millions of dollars. Between the referral or the refunds and then like advertisement and then all the development costs. Like it had to be like three, like three or more like you would think. Well, then if you count the projections because a lot of companies go based off of projections, right?

And so the stock went down after this, you know? And so that you have that kind of unrealized loss too of like the company stock going down because of how big of a failure this was. So all right, listen, we got to take a quick break and then we will come right back. And we're going to hear from Ace about what happened to skull and bones. How can a quadruple A title fail? That just doesn't make any sense. Ace will tell us right after this break. All right, Ace.

I mean, we're fresh off of play in Assassin's Creed, Black Flag. We had positive reception to that game. Ubisoft went, you know what? That's the last game we made that people talked positively about. That's the last game we made people liked. Yeah. Let's see if we can't capture some of that feeling. DJ Callet, another one.

Another one. So, Ace, we mocked Skull and Bones for a long time. This is another game that had a bunch of development issues. What the heck happened to Skull and Bones? Well, Skull and Bones had the issue you already talked about, which was way too long of a development cycle of 11 years. That is insane. That's a long time.

11 years to develop a game is, right, Bethesda, Bethesda. And, okay, well, let's just start where Skull and Bones really went wrong. What was the one thing about Black Flag you think stood out the most, the entire game? It was the Naval Combat. It was the Naval Combat. It's the Naval Combat. Yeah. Ubisoft knew that from the beginning.

2013, Black Flag comes out. Everyone is loving the naval combat. So they go to the studio that made it Ubisoft, Singapore. They tell those developers, hey, we want to make a game that's like this. It's basically black flag, but it's PVP, it's PVEE. It's a big open world. All about the naval combat. All about being a pirate.

That's all that freaking matters. And they were like, all right, we could do that. A few years roll around. Ubisoft's like, well, actually, we don't want it to do that anymore. We wanted to be MMO like Sid Meyers pirates instead now. And the developers are like, but we work on black flag. It was like, yeah, but like you could do this, right? then a few more years passed and they ended up getting some like siege devs in on it

and they're like hey let's make this into an arena shooter where you're on pirate ships it'll be great i promise oh my gosh dude and every time it was just they would bring devs in that did not agree with one another devs that did not work together with one another and did not want to talk to one another at all then they bring skull and bones back to the public for the final time and they're like it's a big open world game where you just sail the ship you can't get off the ship you're just going to be on the ship i remember this dude i remember who decided that who decided

to play a pirate game where you don't get to be a pirate like dude that i remember because we covered black flag or not black flag we covered skull and bones a lot dude like a lot leading up to its release because this game almost got canceled. Then it got uncanneled. Then there was a new head of the studio. There's development issues. Is the game ever going to release? Then they said, oh yeah.

And it's going to be amazing. It's going to be a pirate experience. It's going to be waiting for it. It's going to be so good. Dude, they got mad when people expected it to be Black Flagg 2. Yeah. Yeah. And then they start showcasing it and they show where you need to go get wood and you go up

to an island and you park your boat in a little circle and then your guy goes and collects the wood. And we're like, wait a minute. Yeah. wait you you could do this in black flag I remember asking you because I'd never played it and I went ace I get to like there's on land stuff right do you remember me asking you that yeah you asked me because I had only seen skull and bones

you know what I mean and it was like yeah of course you get to go on land and then like I know that sounded like a dumb question but like do you know why because with skull and bones that's what we saw this was like the next big greatest game from Ubisoft and a game that was I don't know 10 years older than it was more complete of a game than this quadruple A title that they were supposed to be developing. And I mean, dude, this is one, this is the one, like I said, we never root for failure, but there is occasionally where it's like you kind of got what you deserved on this one.

Yeah. They had no vision. They had no vision for what they wanted from this. They just knew they wanted to make money off their naval combat. And that's all they knew. Do you know how much of this game cost them to develop? I don't even know. I mean, 11 year development.

This is got to be insane, dude. So initially, people thought it was roughly 200 million, but recent reports suggested it could be on the low end of $650 million to the high end of $850 million over an 11-year process. What? Well, I mean, Ubisoft is not in the best place financially right now. No, they're not. They've got one foot of grade. I mean, well, this is a big reason as to why.

Like legitimately. They axed for it off. Dude, here's what I don't get. All people wanted was a really good pirate game. How long have we, as gamers, been asking for a really good pirate game? And nobody can give us one. You know what I mean? Like, Windrose.

Windrose is great. That might be one of the best. And I'll be honest, Black Flag, fantastic. But that's not a new game. That's a remake of a game. But like, we cannot get. And that's why people were so excited for Skoll and Bones, because it was like, we were finally going to get that AAA pirate experience that was built off of what they learned

from Assassin's Creed, Black Flag. And instead we got something that was just abysmal. And rightfully so, the game flopped, dude. Like, dude, they get so mad whenever you compare skull and bones to Sea of Thieves. Because Sea of Thieves actually executed what it promised. Yeah. Which was big pirate world. Sea of Thieves was really good at what

Sea of Thieves did. I just, as somebody that needs progression in a game, like other than cosmetic progression, that was my biggest complaint was C of Thieves. Like, illegitimately is it's like, what is this treasure matter.

But what we, but they did. It's a great game. Like, they absolutely built the game that they wanted to build. What we're seeing, though, is that look at this,

and this is hundreds of millions of dollars. And the other games that we've talked about today are hundreds of millions of dollars. and like you you can't just throw money at development like this and like we're seeing that with with what we're talking about today is that that just because you throw one two three four you know go one two three you know go to go to scissory here like count reference like you can't just throw a ton of money at a game and expected to do well just because um uh gamers are fickle they're they're very specific and man, if there's no harder passion,

like they're going to call you out quick, like quick. You know, we saw it with Concord. These devs apparently hated each other too because they worked on completely different genres and they did not get along. I think there's a huge mismanagement. I think out of all these, the one common denominator out of all these

is that there is drastic mismanagement on whoever the lead for these games was. Because you have, I wasn't going to bring it up. Way too big a team. You have hundreds and hundreds of developers that are not able to communicate with each other. Then you have all these different departments and things like that that aren't communicating well. And then you have to try to fit all these pieces of a puzzle together into a final product.

And if you don't have somebody that knows their stuff and is actually overseeing all this and is okay with hearing no, because this is what we saw with Concord, right? Where it's like nobody would say no. Nobody would say, hey, this kind of sucks. Because everybody was scared. And if you don't get that, then you get this game that, comes out and people go, what the crap is this? You know, and then it just flops.

And these development cycles are way too long. The troubled history of skull and bones is legendary. Yeah, like, just scrap it at that point. And I know that's tough, but you're better off not losing $600 million. Should have scrapped it the first time you try to change it to a arena shooter where you don't leave your pirate ship. Like, yeah. Yeah.

So, all right. Let's talk Redfall briefly. this is one where this game never heard of it never heard of it I don't know I know vampire games man vampire games

dude don't do it don't do it now let's talk okay because you know there was excitement all these games had excitement around them that's the other thing these weren't like these were unknown games that people weren't no hype by the time it came dude

arcane studios the makers of dishonored I mean these guys didn't they do death loop too death loop they did death loop right yeah which we weren't fans of Death Loop, but it did get nominated for Game of the Year and stuff like that. But Arcane Studios, you know, they are phenomenal at making these, these stealth-based, your decisions matter, approach things from a lot of different angles and kind of how you want to approach things.

They got forced, basically, into making a multiplayer game. Now, Arcane Studios does not make multiplayer games. They make single-player experiences. And this, once again, is that. chasing the live service model, right? And this is another example of when you're chasing that model, it's not going to work out very well. Arcane Austin is the studio behind Redfall.

They were overseen and had help from Bethesda. And then, of course, Microsoft, since Microsoft owned Bethesda at that time too. But this game was absolutely pressured into the live service micro transactions market for a game and a studio that has never once made a game like that. Like this is not what Arcane Studios does. And, you know, the suits came in and said, no, no, you need to make this game like we say, because we're chasing the almighty dollar. And we all know that that never ends up well.

And unfortunately, this is one where I don't think this is the studio's fault in this case. Like, I think this is absolutely the fault of the suits, we're just going to call them, that push this studio into making a game that they never should have made. Yeah, they put them in a very, uncomfortable situation and expected something out of them that they've never done before. Yeah. So it's like it's not totally on them, but also they're going to get dragged into it regardless because they had their fingers in the pot.

Well, somebody has to take the fall. Yeah. Someone has to take the fall. Unfortunately. Yeah. So there were, you know, there were development issues. This game went through a cycle of being like, hey, we're not quite sure the game that we want to make.

Do we want it to be more far cry, uh, an experience in this open world where you kind of just go around and you can find these things. things to do. Then it kind of switched into the borderlands, kind of, oh, well, this is going to be like a looter shooter type game. And that kind of waffled back and forth for a while. Now, there was, this is actually an interesting tidbit, is that Arcane Austin, who got tasked with this was chronically understaffed. This is something that I did not know about. But for making a triple A game, as hyped as Redfall was, they had less than a hundred people on staff at Arcane Austin.

Like, so there, you're getting massive grind, like crunch, fatigue that you have not enough people to make the game that you're trying to make. This is from, oh, Prey. Prey was the other game. Yeah, Prey is the other game. Yeah, exactly. So 70% of the team that made Prey wound up leaving before Redfall was completed. So you lost all of your talents.

That's bad. And the people that knew how to make a good game, the Prey people left after. Microsoft acquired Bethesden Arcane Austin in 2021. They knew something we did. The other issue is Microsoft basically just said, look, the games in development were hands off. We're not going to tell you what to do, which actually a lot of the developers of the game said was bad because the game was not going in a good direction anyway. And they were hoping that when Microsoft bought out the studio that Microsoft would come in and say, no, let's do this. And Microsoft never stepped in.

And people were like, we want it. This is the one case where we wanted a publisher to step in. And then they didn't. The game released to abysmal reviews, Metacritic scores in the low 50s. The missions were just bland and repetitive. The AI was terrible. Poor performance. Didn't even have 60 frames a second at launch.

And this is not like it was a AAA type graphically, you know, pleasing game. Yeah. You know, it was so bad that the Xbox leadership, because Microsoft bought them out, publicly apologized two gamers for Redfall and said, yeah, we're sorry. This game was estimated to cost $100 to $150 million to make.

Microsoft confirmed it only had minimal sales. It was on GamePass, but that actually inflates the number of sales because you get a concurrent player count then, which is inflated and things like that. It was so bad that they basically gave up pretty quickly. a few post-launch fixes for things. Arcane Austin closed in 2024

after they got shut down. This killed them. This game killed them. They killed the studio. And the reason being is that this was a single-player immersive SIM studio that was forced

into making a multiplayer live-service micro-transaction open-worldish game. Shame on you for making them do that. It was destined for failure from the beginning. and that's what happened. I don't know what you guys...

Still game to do, right, Ryan? Oh, well, hold on. Redfall right now currently has 14 players in game. There's no way people are playing this game right now. I don't even know that are the servers even still available for Redfall? Apparently, I don't know. It's 39. 39.3% review, but there's 14 players in game.

What is wrong at night? What is wrong with people? I know. Yeah. Who hurt you? Who hurt you? Marathon. We don't have a, there's not a ton because like I said, Marathon is literally in, they just moved to the PVE. Like,

I mean, I think that was a few days ago of the recording of this episode. Marathon is trying to pivot to PVEE content because, hey, guess what, guys, extraction shooters are really sweaty and they're for hardcore gamers. And you know what? The majority of gamers out there are nice. That's hard. Yeah, they're not sweaty, hardcore gamers. Now, some people love that kind of game. I am one of those. I, I, I have, Over 100 hours in Marathon, you guys saw me crack out on this game for probably a month straight. I legitimately loved Marathon for a long time. There is a quality, quality game here, people.

The problem is it is a game that nobody asked for and not very many gamers want. Nobody wants it. And that's a problem. And once again, we are seeing the mismanagement of game development and a way too long development cycle that is just costing too much money and you have to absolutely hit the jackpot for that kind of development cycle to pay off

and that's exceedingly hard to do in today's day and age. This is what happened with Marathon. It was plagued with development issues, leadership changes, layoffs in 2024. You had the plagiarism scandal with the artwork that was stolen that they discovered.

That was terrible PR. I totally forgot about that. That's not good. Terrible PR for the studio. when the studio did not need bad PR. It had a beta test that was not received very well. If you remember, they delayed marathon for like seven months or something like that

because they went, hey, feedback is not what we wanted on this. We're going to work on the game. I will say because it's a great game that maybe that worked. But the problem is, is that, again, you didn't look at your market. You released an extraction shooter in a market where it was already dominated by a few extraction shooters, one of which was Arc Raiders,

which was one of the most dominant game releases, like, ever. You know what I mean? And it's like, and people were coming off of the fatigue of Arc Raiders when Marathon launched. And yes, you've got your sweaty competitive gamers like myself that were like, ooh, oh, another hardcore game like I'm in. But that's exceedingly rare, especially when you have all these people that had just put hundreds of hours into arc raiders and were now tired of the genre

and wanted a break from it. And then you release a game that's in that exact genre. You know, so that people out there are like, Josh, you're an idiot. Marathon's terrible. Most gamers think Marathon was pretty good. It's sitting at an 84% positive rating on Steam with 35,000 reviews. Most people that have played Marathon actually like Marathon. Is it a hard game to get into, is there a steep learning curve? Absolutely. If you get past that, like Ryan did, you start to go, wow, I think this game's

actually really good. Yeah. No, it's absolutely a quality game, but it's a very, I guess you would say niche, like game. Like it's... It is niche. It's like Tarkov. It's like for the sweats, man. It's a game that is for a specific type of

people and they're going to like it and it's going to be a blast, but it's not for everybody. I mean, there's only 6,000 people playing right now. Like, it's, so you have a, you have a street. You have this, you have this city, and you have a street, and there's six taco shops, and you're like, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to make a taco shop.

And you put a taco shop there. Your taco shop may be pretty decent and maybe all right, but there's a bunch of others. So, like, you're not going to get the numbers you would if you did something different that, that stands out or is something that people are asking for. everyone's like, well, you know, we would like Italian food and you're just like, ah, you shut up, you know what you're talking about. I'm going to make a taco shop. So there's

a lot here for a game, but it just sucks in the market that we're at and in the climate and how many other extraction shooters there are because like you said, Josh, you have a hundred hours in there. That's for good reason. You know video games.

You know what you like and stuff and it's quality. So, um, I think, it's a really good game, but it's just, it's just a bummer. It's the wrong time. And I think they could have done a few things differently, but, um, yeah, it just, it would definitely was a flop. It, listen, I love, I loved the, my time with the extraction shooter of, of marathon, but if this game was going to be successful, it needed to be a PVE experience. You alienated too many people, to be honest, and it's too late. You cannot pivot to that now, which they are desperately trying to do, but it's too late.

is what it need to be. You can't do it because they're going to get, they're going to get shut down. Like, honestly, they're going to get shut down. Like, like, Marathon and the failure of Marathon is what caused Destiny 2 to get shut down. And they started shifting and saying, we're going to lose a ton of money because Marathon is estimated to have cost $200 to $270 plus million to develop. It sold 1.2 million copies. So that's about 50 to 55 million in revenue. And it's mostly on PC.

Even though this game was available on console, it actually had a stronger piece. PC presence. It did launch to decent reception. Like I said, at its height, it had 88,000 concurrent player count. But a sweaty, intense game is not the kind of game that most gamers want to go back to. And that player count has dwindled. And Ryan, you mentioned the 6,000 count. That's down from 15,000 because it shot up to 15,000 when they released the PVE content and is now back down to 6,000, which is showing you that this is not going over very well.

And there's over, there's 40,000 more players right now through SteamDB on Destiny 2, a dead game. Yeah. And, and that's, I mean, Destiny 2 is free, though. That tells you everything you need to know. I mean, that's fair. Marathon had a price. Yeah. It's not free in a market where it really should have been.

Yeah. So, you know, Marathon will flop. I don't see any other way that it's not going to flop, which makes me a little sad because, like I said, as somebody was put in over 100 hours to this game, there was a really, I'm glad you all liked it. I thought it was ugly as sin. Fun video game to me that was polished. Yeah, yeah, you hate. I hate oversaturated colors all over the place.

Yeah, I do. So there you go, people. I mean, the one common denominator on this, I think, is chasing a trend that you should not chase. Don't, just because everybody in the world is making a live service open world game does not mean that you should be making a live service open world game. Here's the one lesson you should take away from this. And that's don't be Ubisoft. So there you go. Don't be Ubisoft.

Yeah. Game developers, quit chasing, whoever you are. Yeah. Don't be Ubisoft. Ubisoft, if you're listening. Put it on a plaque in your office.

Don't be you. Don't be Ubisoft. You know what's going to. And Ace, I hate that you're so right, but Ubisoft will absolutely do nothing but remake every game in their franchise at this point. That's all they're good at,

man. Until they just fade into obscurity. I'm in for that. Like, I'm in for that. Like, let them make, no, let them remake it.

I'll buy it and then they could fade away. But they'll never. fade away if you buy. Yeah, they're never going to fade away if you keep buying all their games. They're going to run out of things to remake and then they have nothing. But then they'll have the remake of the remake, Ryan. Yeah, the remake of the remake for the next generation. It's been 30 years. And then they come back again. Yeah. All right. Well, listen, there you go, everybody. There's Concord. There's Redfall. There's Marathon. There's skull and bones and there's Star Wars outlaws. The one game that didn't deserve this is Star Wars outlaws, in my opinion.

You know, it's not the greatest game ever made, but it was plenty fine. It was a a great Star Wars IP. It was an enjoyable game. That's the one that kind of hurts, in my opinion. You know, some of these games absolutely deserved it. You know, I, listen, these mega publishers that are spending hundreds of millions of dollars, employ a couple gamers, man. Stop it. Just employ a couple gamers. They like legitimately just put them on the payroll, give them games to play all day. They'll think it's the greatest job in the world and they will not be afraid to tell you, bro, I don't think this is working, man. You should not be doing this. You know, like, and then listen to them. If you were spending all of this money, how do you not have somebody

on your payroll that is willing to tell you that your game is not looking good or that you shouldn't go this route or that you shouldn't put this in your game? Or hey, bro, I don't think chasing the hero shooter genre right now is. the best idea, you know, or hey, extraction shooters, people that love them, love them, but there's not enough people out there to support a $250 million extraction shooter. Like, if somebody had told them that years ago, we probably wouldn't be in this spot, but here we are. So hopefully there's lessons to be learned here.

I would like to think that these developers will get smarter. Ryan is shaking his head because, no, I don't think so. You know what I mean? and we see it time and time again, and this is why we see these games flop, because it is studios chasing trends, or making people make games that they shouldn't be making, and there's too much bloat.

The development cycle takes way too long nowadays. That's something that absolutely has to change, and I hope it does. I hope that they're, you know, from these flops, there are lessons that the gaming industry will learn from. So there you go. Now you know, and guys,

we might revisit this because there's a lot. There's a lot of games that we filtered out. met their demise quite quickly. Let us know if you liked this episode. If there was a game that flop that you were, you know, a little bit more intimately familiar with or that hurt your gamer, gamer feelings because you were excited with it. You know,

let us know in the comments. We read all the comments in the episode, but we want to know what you think about this episode. Do you want to hear more about what happened to various games like this? You know, and if there's a game that flopped that just broke your heart, like all of these did ours. We were excited for all these games, man, to be honest. So, all right, once again, thank you to everybody that has signed up to support this podcast

recently. The support from the listeners is absolutely incredible. We are just blown away. We are humbled. We're going to pay the price for it because we're going to play the games that you all are making us play. So in August, you will get a triple deep dive episode from the three of us to talk about the games that we.

we got forced to experience. These are all games that we should have played. So I like the fact that the community came out and said, nah, nah, it's time to fix this problem, boys. And we are fixing it. So listen, if you haven't done so already, make sure you hit that plus button, that follow button, so that you get all of our episodes the day that they release.

We release three episodes each and every week, Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays to keep your week flowing with the gaming news, the gaming fun, and just some entertainment. Thank you, everybody. that's going to do it for this episode. Until next time, happy gaming. See ya.

Peace out.