Audience Alienating Premise / Video Games

Audience-Alienating Premises in video games.

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Genres

• "Blockchain games" became a subgenre of games that started appearing during the crypto boom of 2021-2022, advertising themselves around their handling of cryptocurrency, many of them often touting themselves as "play-to-earn" games that reward you with NFTs that can be used as investments to make yourself a nice profit. Crypto and NFTs are already extremely controversial as is, and despite many gaming companies attempting to cash in on the technology, almost none of these endeavors have ever taken off in providing lasting success. In addition to many instances often being low-effort scams^note (The immutability of crypto makes it extremely easy for enterprising "studios" to trick unsuspecting consumers into spending real money for non-refundable commodities that are effectively worthless), the big fundamental turnoff is that many of these games simply aren't fun or interesting, since actual gameplay is treated as an afterthought to what is first and foremost a monetization platform to siphon money from the audience's wallets. The principle behind NFTs — the supposed consumer-side benefit of such games, hence the promises of being "play-to-earn" — is that they serve as investments that one should buy and wait to profit off of when the project and/or respective currency is at a peak, but due to various factors from economic strife to simple disinterest, such boom periods never actually occur, making them unappealing even as a form of money-making. Even if low-depth gameplay isn't a concern, actually handling crypto tends to be very complicated and obtuse^note (Since crypto avoids government and banking oversight by design, and neither governments nor banks tend to be fans of crypto due to their shady legality and general vulnerability, many blockchain games have to work with confusing infrastructural leaps to even enable the accessing and trade of crypto, usually involving approval periods and layering of various wallets that may still end up being denied.), adding a steep barrier to entry which makes it further niche to casual audiences that microtransaction-heavy games usually target. The fraction of blockchain games that don't centrally rely on NFTs instead receive criticism that they might as well use a more traditional approach to microtransactions in using actual money for in-game currency, since — while still not without controversy — it's usually more permissible and intuitive^note (Many banks, credit card companies, as well as platforms like Steam and itch.io block or ban all transactions regarding blockchain and NFT exchange. Conversely, the likes of Steam and Epic Games Store provide the ability to implement integrated payment systems for normal money). Any triple-A gaming studio attempting to get into crypto tends to be met with immense backlash, often leading to them pulling out of the field^note (Ubisoft tried their hands at crypto with Ghost Recon Breakpoint — which already launched in 2019 as being a financial disappointment — by implementing NFTs in 2021, but the value of such NFTs completely died the following year and all support for the game was discontinued shortly afterwards), while projects from enterprising studios — even relatively successful titles like Axie Infinity and Gods Unchained — have dwindled drastically in player count and value, especially after the NFT bubble collectively burst around 2022-2023.

Systems

• The Atari Jaguar CD. How do you try and save your last ditch failing console, and with it your company? With a $150^note $295 in 2023 dollars CD-ROM add-on! Add-on systems are this trope to the portion of the population that doesn't own the parent console to begin with, but the Sega CD being a modest success (though not nearly as much of one as Sega thought it would be) and the TurboGrafix-CD selling well in Japan proved the concept can work if the parent console is also selling well. The Jaguar moved only 150,000 units at most, to give you an idea of how awful that sales figure is that's roughly the same amount of units as the Amiga CD32, which never got a full release outside of the United Kingdom, and the hated Sega 32X (listed below) outsold the Jaguar by a 4 to 1 margin. Sales figures of the Jaguar CD are unconfirmed but it's believed that no more than 15,000 were produced, probably less than 10,000 were sold and many were returned as defective. Only 11 games were released. Thanks to the awful build quality and terrible sales the rare working Jaguar CD can fetch up to $1,000 on auction sites.
• The Casio Loopy was an attempt to market a console toward girls. It had a unique gimmick of being able to print stickers using a built-in thermal printer, something that young Japanese girls would be into according to two Casio engineers at the time, but was a total flop. With only 10 games to the Loopy's library — nearly all of which were glorified paint programs and activity centers designed to make stickers with sweet, feminine visuals and themes throughout — and only one controller port guaranteed to limit games to single-player only, not even the extremely niche target audience was able to latch on to it seeing as it was little more than a sticker printer that played games, rather than a game console with a printer. Because of its short lifespan (Oct. 1995-Nov. '96 for software, Oct. '95-Dec. '98 for hardware) and poor sales, the Loopy never saw a release outside of Japan.
• Google Stadia was heavily pushed in late 2019 as Google's major foray into the gaming world, a Cloud Gaming-based platform for a relatively inexpensive price and theoretically high accessibility, but was completely overshadowed by skepticism and ridicule for its conditions. Cloud gaming is already heavily contentious, inherently demanding consistent, high-quality internet and introducing some degree of input lag, but Stadia also came with a controversial subscription fee in addition to paying full-price for games, as well as concerns of longevity as since every game copy exists solely on Google's servers, you'd lose everything if the servers or service itself went down. The latter concern was especially worrying among critics as Google built a history of quietly cancelling projects or services once they underperform, meaning its future was on shaky ground from the get-go, where a lot of users refused to invest in something that Google was likely to kill anyway. One of its main selling points of not requiring users to purchase expensive hardware like a console or PC similarly failed to gain it an audience, as anyone interested in non-mobile games likely already has said hardware and/or doesn't consider the tradeoffs of a purely cloud service to be worth it. It especially didn't help that Stadia severely lacked not just Killer Apps, but exclusive content in general to provide any positive momentum, instead being marred by the bad publicity of connectivity issues and news of it shuttering its in-house development studio in early 2021, before it ever announced a single title. The lack of interest in the platform was made painfully obvious when even the coronavirus pandemic, which started mere months after Stadia's launch and granted a massive boost to the gaming industry, barely moved the needle on the truly dismal sales figures. The service sputtered out entirely by the end of 2022, with Google terminating its storefront services and taking it offline in early 2023.
• As CD-ROM technology started becoming cheaper jack-of-all-trades "infotainment" systems, basically budget PCs that could load games like a console, became all the rage among electronics companies. That gave us the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer, the Philips CD-i, and the VIS^note Video Information System. The first two managed to scrape together enough sales to avoid this trope,^note 2 million for the 3DO and around 650,000 for the CD-i, though most of the latter's sales came from businesses and educational institutions, not game players there's a reason the third one doesn't have its own page. While all three of those consoles were hamstrung by a $700 MSRP (even 30 years later consoles don't cost that much) the 3DO and CD-i at least made the attempt to get games released. Not good games in the latter's case, but they tried. 70 titles were released for the VIS but only one could be really considered a console game: Links: The Challenge of Golf, which was ported all over the place. Everything else is point-and-click edutainment software that will make you wish you were using a mouse instead of a controller. Not that you would have known the VIS existed in the first place as it was only sold through Radio Shack (Tandy was a Radio Shack house brand, the VIS was also sold under Memorex branding), many Radio Shack employees later recounted that they knew the VIS was a lost cause (dubbing it the "Virtually Impossible to Sell") and didn't even waste their time trying to push it. Only 11,000 were sold and many collectors don't even know it exists, and many of the ones that do really don't care since everything released for the VIS was ported from something else.
• Nintendo:
  • The Virtual Boy. While virtual reality was being seen as the next big leap in gaming at the time, the system failed to make good on that promise. The red-and-black graphics every game was stuck with were eye-straining and disappointingly low-tech, even at the time. Despite being a portable system, you couldn't really use it without a table since it was too big and bulky to wear, and few games actually gave the feeling of 3D visual effects, much less virtual reality. Few were surprised when it was discovered years later that it was a proof-of-concept prototype thrown onto market to bide time for the Nintendo 64. The Virtual Boy remains Nintendo's least successful piece of standalone hardware; the 3D gimmick of the Nintendo 3DS almost didn't exist because execs were worried about another VB-style failure, and the most acknowledgement the system gets from Nintendo is through the occasional self-deprecating gag, though it took a decade before they even felt comfortable acknowledging it.
  • The Wii U. Casual gamers, particularly those in the "blue ocean" that made the Wii a success, were barely aware that it was even a standalone console, with the name and marketing making many believe it was just an expensive add-on tablet controller for the Wii (which by 2012 was nothing more than a Wii Sports and Just Dance machine for that audience). And those that did know had no interest in buying a new console when the type of gaming experiences they wanted were now more readily available on smartphones. Meanwhile, hardcore gamers rejected it due to its relatively weak technical specifications compared to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One as well as inconsistent messaging regarding the direction Nintendo wanted to take the platform. The lack of a Killer App, as Nintendo's first-party releases were few and far between for its early years, didn't help with this market either. The Wii U would become Nintendo's worst selling home console at under 14 million units shipped, and there is little reason for even Nintendo fans to hunt down the system except out of curiosity or to use it for homebrewing, as almost all of its exclusives were either given Updated Rereleases or Even Better Sequels on the company's far more successful follow-up, the Nintendo Switch.^note A big issue with the WiiU is the GamePad, which cost almost as much to produce as the console itself and therefore was made in pretty limited numbers. It was never sold separately outside of Japan and pretty difficult to find secondhand, and expensive if you can find it. Plus, most Wii U games require the GamePad, so if it breaks you're SOL (though this is a Nintendo product we're talking about here, so it's pretty durable) until you bust out at least $150 for another one.
• The Ouya. Instead of functioning as a cheap home console that supports Android games and user-generated content, the Ouya ended up combining the home console's lack of portability and convenience with the smartphone's weak hardware and shallow pool of games. Many developers and gamers were frustrated by the base console's locked software and the DRMed video output, which they claimed made it too difficult for homebrewing custom software and creating Let's Play videos. The hardware itself was poorly built, the game library was filled with shovelware games (with one infamous game being nothing but animated rain) and struggled to run even basic smartphone games despite its Android operating system; even the main unspoken side benefit —its easy means of retro console Emulation— could also be accomplished by numerous other, far cheaper Android-based TV boxes. The console was subsequently discontinued in 2015, less than two years after coming to market, and has become the poster boy for the failed "microconsole" concept.
• The PC-FX, NEC's second attempt at a successor to the TurboGrafx-16^note The first being the SuperGrafx, which died after just half a dozen games. It completely lacked a polygon graphics processor at a time when the industry was making a major shift towards 3D gaming, as the company wasn't convinced polygons would be the future of video games due to the blocky and simple appearance of such games at the time. Instead, they tried to advance interactive movies, heavily pushing for software based on popular anime series and featuring pre-rendered animated footage. The lack of 3D made it come across as vastly inferior to consumers and developers alike. The PC-FX also boasted a higher price than the PlayStation and Sega Saturn; NEC tried to offset said pricing by marketing it as a multimedia device, but the only popular format it was capable of playing was audio CDs, which Sony's cheaper console could already do. In the end, the system only had a library of 62 games, never left Japan, and became NEC's final console.
• The Pioneer Laseractive was a console designed to use LaserDiscs and came with add-ons that doubled as a Sega Genesis, TurboGrafx-16, and other functions. The problem that it quickly ran into was that anybody who was interested in the systems represented by the add-ons likely already had them or would just buy those instead. Furthermore, the system's exclusive library required at least one of the two to play its games, with some only functioning with one of the two, which at $970 for the Laseractive plus another $600 for each add-on in 1993 was far too steep for anyone but the ultra-wealthy. It thus quickly fell into extreme obscurity.
• Sega:
  • The Sega 32X was an add-on for the Sega Genesis that allowed for, as the name suggests, 32-bit gaming. However, not only did it came out shortly after the Sega CD, another add-on for the Genesis that was met with lukewarm reception, but consumers would soon learn that Sega was developing a standalone 32-bit system as well: the Sega Saturn, which would release before the 32X in Japan and only six months after it in North America. Gamers had little interest in purchasing a very temporary stopgap that wouldn't be supported with games for long, and Sega themselves forced their American division to make it out of fear of the Atari Jaguar. As a result, the 32X was a flop that only sold 600K units worldwide^note Which is still 4 times the amount of Atari Jaguars that were sold, so as it turns out, Sega needn't have worried. It also greatly damaged the company's reputation in the West, being one of the reasons for the failure of the Saturn in North America, as a distrustful consumer base was now wary of a third piece of hardware that might under-deliver. The irrevocably-tarnished reputation Sega had gotten due to the dual failures of the 32X and Saturn would ultimately doom their last console, the Dreamcast, to an early grave and make them exit the console market to focus exclusively on 3rd-party games.
  • The Genesis Nomad. While on paper it seemed like a great idea to have a portable version of the Sega Genesis, several aspects of it were alienating: The short battery life (six AA batteries would last about an hour or so — if that), the bulky size, and being out around when Genesis games stopped being made (released around the time of fifth-generation consoles like the Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation). The handheld was a flop, selling around one million units, most at heavy discounts (peanuts compared to the Game Gear's 11 million) and disappeared shortly after release.^note You could arguably add the TurboExpress, which was a portable TurboGrafx-16 released all the way back in 1990, to this list as well. Particularly in the U.S., where there TG-16 flopped to begin with. Considering the rather eye-watering $250 sticker price (about $575 in 2023 dollars) NEC knew that it was a niche product for wealthy gamers (or gamers with wealthy parents), and it still managed to outsell the Nomad by a half million units. Tellingly no one else would try a portable version of a home console until Nintendo decided to combine their home and portable consoles into one device and released the Nintendo Switch in 2017, which outsold the combined sales of the Nomad and TurboExpress within a month of it being released.
• XBAND was a product for the SNES and Genesis that allowed gamers to play various games online, predating the likes of Xbox Live and PlayStation Network and Sega's SegaNet. It was critically acclaimed, but it ultimately failed commercially and was shut down a few years after launch. The truth of the matter is that it came out at the wrong time: online gaming was a particularly niche new market in 1994, as the internet itself had yet to reach any sort of widespread adoption. Lack of developer support meant the already small team had to spend extra time reverse engineering games to work on the service themselves, and when attempting to expand to the Saturn in Japan, they found themselves unable to compete with Sega's own Net Link service (the predecessor of the aforementioned SegaNet).

Studios

• Capcom is the developer behind several world-renowned franchises, but even it isn't immune to making games few people wanted:
  • Street Fighter III, the long-awaited sequel to the Earth-shatteringly successful Street Fighter II, ended up greatly underperforming. Several huge reasons are usually given for its failure:
    • Most infamously, Capcom opted to replace almost the entire cast from the previous games with a new roster of fighters, with Ryu and Ken being the lone holdovers. They were likely trying to replicate the near-complete cast changeover from Street Fighter to II and hoping for similar success, without realizing how different the circumstances were. The first Street Fighter was a cult hit at best, meaning nobody really cared when everybody except for Ryu, Ken, and Sagat was left out of the sequel. Furthermore, none of the characters in the original Street Fighter beside Ryu and Ken were playable, meaning there were no players upset that the time and effort they spent learning their character's moveset wouldn't carry over to alienate. Street Fighter II, on the other hand, had proven to be a global sensation, with the new fighters becoming Household Names overnight and subsequently appearing in the Street Fighter Alpha prequel series, as well as the live-action and animated movies and both the Western and Japanese TV adaptations. This meant audiences were far more attached to these characters than the ones from the original game, and their absence in Street Fighter III incited far more backlash than expected.
    • The game was released in 1997, right as American arcades were dying and when 3D fighting games like Virtua Fighter and Tekken were becoming extremely popular. Despite Street Fighter III having cutting edge, beautifully animated hand-drawn sprites for the time, many casual gamers dismissed it as looking cheap or outdated.
    • The game was far more complex and strategic than Street Fighter II or any of the Alpha games, turning off new players. It later found success among tournament players and the Fighting Game Community, but to this day, it still has a reputation for being very unfriendly to newbies or casual gamers.
    • The game was developed for Capcom's brand new CPS-3 arcade cabinet. This allowed for far more detailed, fluid sprites than in the CPS-2 fighting games like the Alpha series, but consequently made III far more expensive for arcade operators. This, coupled with the declining popularity of 2D fighting games and arcades in general, meant that many operators passed on ordering the game. The advanced graphics also meant that III couldn't be ported to most of the then-current home consoles without sacrificing features or animations, as had happened with X-Men vs. Street Fighter the previous year. It didn't get a home release until two years later, and even then, only for Sega's Dreamcast system. While the Alpha games and Street Fighter EX had sold well on home consoles, Capcom couldn't repeat that same success when III was only available on the Dreamcast, a system that had never been as successful as the PlayStation. III eventually saw a PS2 release in 2004, seven years later.
    • In the end, Capcom released a third Alpha game the following year, which brought back even more of the characters from Street Fighter II (namely Cammy, Balrog, Vega and E. Honda) in an effort to Win Back the Crowd. While the CPS-2 hardware meant that the graphics in Alpha 3 didn't look as good as the ones in III, it also made the game much cheaper for arcade owners and allowed it to be released for the PlayStation, where it sold a million copies. The CPS-3 ended up dead in the water, and Capcom's future 2D fighting games like the Marvel vs. Capcom and SNK vs. Capcom series wound up either utilizing the CPS-2 or different system boards like Sega's NAOMI hardware. Those games also made sure to mostly feature Capcom characters from Street Fighter II and the Alpha trilogy in order to avoid alienating fans in the same way they'd done with III. That said, characters from III eventually filtered their way into IV, with some even carrying over into V.
  • Street Fighter V eventually found its niche and became a success, but its first year or so was rough indeed:
    • Street Fighter V is the most simplified entry in the Street Fighter series since Street Fighter II, the idea being that the simplified gameplay would bring in new players, while a stripping-down of single-player content and a stronger focus on online and competitive play would bolster the hardcore fan-base. The result was that the casual audience complained that there was not enough single player content, while the hardcore audience complained that the game was too dumbed-down and boring. Capcom expected the game to sell 2 million copies in its first month, a mark it had failed to reach 8 months after its release. Capcom leaned their lesson and made sure that Street Fighter 6 launched with more substantial single-player content, including a campaign mode that features an explorable open world and a customizable protagonist.
    • Capcom was worried about this during broadcasts of their Capcom Pro Tour tournaments. As such, they started placing bans on their sexier DLC costumes at tournaments. This move served to immediately divide fans, with some deriding Capcom for banning something they created themselves in the name of censorship and others stating that such a ban proves Capcom knows how ridiculous the Stripperiffic costumes look.
  • This is often cited as a major reason for why Street Fighter X Tekken failed. Tekken has a very different gameplay style to Street Fighter (a 3D fighter versus a 2D fighter), so invariably, one side was going to come out in a different genre—naturally, it ended up being Tekken, so Tekken fans weren't on board with the idea^note Originally, the plan was to later release a follow-up called Tekken X Street Fighter that would have Tekken-like gameplay in order to cater to that crowd, but those plans were sunk after the first game's failure. But on the other hand, so much of its content was recycled from Street Fighter IV that a lot of Street Fighter fans wondered why they should pick it up when they already had about 40% of it. And that was before getting into the gem system, which let (or forced, to be more precise, since the use of gems was mandatory in all modes) people equip characters with hundreds of different gems to change up their fighting styles: the hardcore fighting game crowd gets rankled at the implication of things that make matches less predictable, while casual players were antsy about implications of Bribing Your Way to Victory when it turned out DLC and preorder bonus gems were inordinately powerful. Initial sales projections straight-up mashed the sales of Tekken and Street Fighter together because Capcom assumed both fanbases would be on board. Suffice it to say, this didn't happen.
  • Breath of Fire: The games after the fourth one were very controversial for their premise:
    • Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter completely flips the formula on its head, putting the characters in a mundane underground after an apocalyptic war, something more akin to Survival Horror, in contrast to the colorful overworld and fantastic dungeons in the first four games. Gone are the familiar beast and furry types, and Nina is reduced to a mute Living MacGuffin. The gameplay threw many people off, including longtime Breath of Fire fans, as the SOL (Scenario Overlay)^note replaying the same scenarios over and over to get different scenes and results, D-ratio, and D-counter^note for example, reaching 100% on the D-counter is an instant Game Over systems are very confusing when you just get into the game. Oh, and you are not even allowed to actually save your game except in certain circumstances (though you can suspend it for later play). It did gain cult status much later, but it was too late, and no new games were made for the series. Until, thirteen years later...
    • Breath of Fire 6. Being a simplified mobile gacha game was a real turn-off for the older fans as they viewed it as a cynical cash grab, and it failed to hold anything that would differentiate it from the other gachapon works already in Japan. Worse, the main character is NOT Ryu (though he is in the game), but another Dragon Clansman you create. These turned off the old fans and failed to garner any new ones, to the point that not only did it fail to even reach overseas, but on June 2017, the game completely shut down for good. As of 2021, no new Breath of Fire games are planned.
  • DmC: Devil May Cry, despite reviewing quite well, ended up being a sales disappointment in large part for this reason. It was a Continuity Reboot of a fairly successful franchise that had sold itself largely on character, which largely distinguished itself by swapping out the original protagonist for a far more abrasive, foul-mouthed, and generally immature take, who was also significantly redesigned. This created instant animosity with fans who immediately accused him of being Dante In Name Only, as well as coming at a time where there was a significant backlash to "Westernizing" Japanese franchises and the "edgy" styling that the new Dante seemed to embody. Other traits of the game became similarly contentious: the combat system was significantly simplified, and the story was built heavily around attempts at sociopolitical commentary, resulting in fans accusing it of being dumbed-down on one end and pretentious on the other. It didn't help matters that the designers and marketing seemed to exult in attacking both the critical side of the fanbase and the franchise's prior status quo, with one infamous presentation making homophobic jokes about the original Dante. The result was that, after repeatedly underperforming even in rereleases, Capcom made the unusual decision to Un Reboot the franchise, with the next game outselling DmC's entire lifetime sales in only a few months.
• Like Capcom, Konami also had a few missteps in their franchises despite having a stellar record of good games:
  • Boktai had a gimmick of UV sensors built into the game cartridge, the idea being that you should play in real-life sunlight (although you can "cheat" by using a blacklight) so the solar power can be used to power the main player character's in-game weapon. Despite getting positive reviews, the idea of a game that penalizes you for playing at night or during bad weather or forces you to endure overly hot weather didn't appeal to many people (not helped by the first two games' Western releases being in the months of September and October respectively, not times one would associate with enjoying sunshine), leading to the games' Acclaimed Flop status, the third game getting No Export for You, and the gimmick being made completely optional for Lunar Knights, the fourth game. ^note Albeit for technical reasons, since it's for Nintendo DS, whose Game Cards are smaller and harder to fit gimmicks onto, so to use solar power in that game, you need to insert one of the GBA games into the second slot.
  • Bombergirl, by the accounts of those who have played it, is a pretty fun, arcade-y take on the classic Bomberman gameplay with Tower Defense leanings. Unfortunately, it's also Hotter and Sexier. This isn't alienating in itself, but Bomberman is a series that was almost entirely non-sexualized up to this point, which made the gratuitous Clothing Damage and fanservice come off as tacky if not outright Fetish Retardant. While the arcade game has a decent following in Japan, with plenty of merchandise and the game itself garnering a sequel in Bombergirl Rainbow, Western fans of the franchise had no interest in it and it never got an official release outside Japan.
  • Metal Gear Survive, even disregarding all the drama surrounding Konami at the time — between Hideo Kojima's departure and the ex-Kons health insurance controversy — its premise was already in question, since the demand for another open world survival game with zombies had long since run out. Being a Metal Gear game that dropped the series' traditional formula for the aforementioned survival game mechanics didn't help the game's case either. It proceeded to sell a dismal 100,000 copies in its first week, and Konami avoided discussing its final sales total that fiscal year.
  • Otomedius is a Gradius parody game which exchanges the spaceships with scantily-clad females showing off their bosom. This is just too weird for those looking for a Konami-styled shmup, and the series became a tiny niche afterward. Even those that didn't mind the gratuitous fanservice found the games themselves to be middling at best compared to the iconic shmup franchise it was spun off of. The series became a tiny niche afterward.
  • Parodius. While the cute, cartoony aspect is endearing, the raunchy content and, in later games, excessive Fanservice (to the point that the last game of the series is called Sexy Parodius) feels out of place for many players, especially younger players and non-Japanese players. It was because of this that much of the series never left Japan.
• Any of the games developed by "Mystique" (later re-branded as "Playaround") can apply. The company made pornographic video games for the Atari 2600, a system with extremely limited graphics, a recipe for Fetish Retardant.
  • The weirdest premise would have to be Beat 'Em & Eat 'Em; where you play as two naked girls trying to catch ejaculation in their mouths from a man masturbating on a rooftop (though it's colored yellow for some reason, probably because of color limitations). Even worse is the gender-swapped version called Philly Flasher where you control two men catching breast milk from a witch who isn't even a Hot Witch, but rather a Wicked Witch who appears to be elderly and unattractive due to her white hair, Sinister Schnoz, and Thin Chin of Sin. Really makes you wonder what types of people they were trying to appeal to.
    AVGN: This game really disturbs me. But I don't get it! Is this supposed to be erotic? I don't know about you, but I'm not AT ALL turned on by some old wrinkly shitty witch titties. That's fuckin' nasty, man!
  • Custer's Revenge is their most infamous game. It's about General Custer having sex ^note Word of God and the manual imply that it's consensual, while the back of the box suggests otherwise ("she's not about to take it lying down!"); either way, many feminist groups interpreted it as rape, which pushed the game into further controversy. with a Native American woman tied to what is either a pole or a cactus. There is no getting past the blocky low-resolution graphics (in a porn game) and gameplay that's primitive and repetitive even by early 1980s standards, even before you start on how horrendously racist and sexist the premise is (even though it's fairly tame in-game, because of the aforementioned bad graphics). And it was the most expensive Atari 2600 game, retailing a few pennies shy of $50! Despite being unfit for gamers, masturbators, consumers and anyone with tasteful social politics, it ended up selling well due to its Bile Fascination. There's also an alternate version named Westward Ho! that turns the tables (you play as the Native American woman and Custer is the one tied to a pole).
• Sierra: Being in the video game business for over twenty years, and with a scope far greater than their mega-hit adventure games, some duds were inevitable:
  • Stunt Flyer was a 1983 game for the Commodore 64 that was a clone of Microsoft Flight Simulator with one gimmick: If you crashed your plane in Competition Mode, the game would erase from your disk. Not a saved game. The game itself. Meaning you either had to have a backup or buy a brand new game. All it did was alienate any potential audience and kill any chance of the game going anywhere, to the point where Sierra themselves disparaged it. This feature was mocked◊ in the fall 1994 issue of Sierra's InterAction magazine, celebrating Sierra's fifteenth anniversary, comparing old games to new:
    "Ken's big feature... was that if you played the game in 'Competition Mode' and you crashed your plane, it would also crash your software. Ken thought this would give players the feel that they were really risking a lot doing 'death defying maneuvers'.
    What really happened is that we got lots of angry letters from customers and a game with a very short software store shelf life."
  • The Black Cauldron is one of Sierra's AGI adventure games in the mold of King's Quest, but it performed poorly. First of all, the text parser was removed and replaced with function buttons performing as action keys, making it too easy for seasoned adventure gamers but (still) too complicated for even younger players. Hyperactive Metabolism is in play, something not seen in other Sierra adventure games until then, making it too frustrating for anyone playing, especially the limited sources of food or water for Taran to survive. There is Nightmare Fuel by the bucketload, especially near the Horned King's castle, making it a not-so-friendly game for families and children, especially compared to the lighter fare that Sierra created in earlier years. Because of this, the game flopped, and Sierra reverted back to their classic parser and simpler mechanics in future adventure games. However, the game is revered as a cult classic nowadays, and the mechanics are more respected as being quite innovative — it was just too early and for the wrong audience.
  • Jones in the Fast Lane was supposed to be a game akin to The Game of Life. But the box cover, intro, and realistic graphics (including all the characters save Jones merely digitized pictures of Sierra employees) all make it too easy to think it is a non-game financial, budget management, and life goal program^note The premise was likely a parody of such programs, but unfortunately was taken a bit too affectionately. Not surprisingly, it sold poorly and was all but shoved aside for Sierra's other works.
  • The Adventures of Willy Beamish (co-produced with Dynamix) ran with the tagline "What if you were nine again, knowing what you know now?" Marketed towards teens and adults and sprinkled with adult humor and mature situations, they couldn't tell it was for them from the cover with the rather clean image of a kid skateboarding with his pet frog in tow. The titular hero's relatively goody-goody view of life^note enforced by the Karma Meter — do too many bad deeds and it's a game over — especially compared to, say, Bart Simpson — and the childish main plot of trying to enter a video game championship doesn't help either. And kids will be quickly alienated by the mature content and the various references and humor only adults would understand. The game flopped and a planned sequel (with Willy as a teenager) was quickly scrapped.
  • Police Quest 4: Open Season: The fourth game of the popular Police Quest series takes the player away from Sonny Bonds and the city of Lytton and puts them in Los Angeles with a different detective, making it completely unrelated except for the police theme. The puzzles involve more Fake Longevity (e.g. removing fifteen slugs from the wall in a Pixel Hunt in the beginning) and ridiculous MacGyvering in many situations, alienating even seasoned adventure gamers in an era when the Adventure Game genre was in the start of its decline. Worse, the game appears to have a deeply unsympathetic and outright bigoted view on racial and sexual minorities, and poor people in general, portraying them as freaks and deviants at best and worst, violent and mentally unstable threats that must be eliminated. Even for a game written in the 1990s, it caused quite a bit of controversy. This would be the last Police Quest game in the series until the S.W.A.T. spinoffs, which were tactical first-person shooters rather than the adventure games they spun off from.
• Belgian developer Tale of Tales, who referred to themselves as "Purveyors of Beauty and Joy. Realtime artists. Sometimes confused with videogame developers.", made a lot of Art Games. Some of their games were warmly received by critics who found their games had artistic merit, but almost always ignored by the gaming community at large. Some examples:
  • The Endless Forest, an MMO (that also can be ran as a screensaver) where you play as a deer and wander around a forest. There is no combat or clear objectives of any kind, so MMORPG fans will be bored by the lack of gameplay. Communications involve deer sounds and body language, so people looking for a social game will have a hard time socializing. Even naming your deer uses pictograms. And if you just want to be a deer and wander through a beautiful forest, the deer all have disturbingly human faces à la Seaman.
  • The Graveyard, a very short game available in free or paid versions. Its objective is to walk straight and sit down. The difference between the free or paid-for version? In the paid-for version, sometimes, the grandmother which you control will die of natural causes accompanied with a short poem.
  • Luxuria Superbia, a "musical and visual journey" game that's a very thinly-veiled metaphor for sex and orgasm.
  • Bientot Lete, a game that simulates a Long-Distance Relationship with a nonsensical chess game and jumbled French dialogue.
  • This culminated with Sunset (2015), a game where you play as a janitor in the middle of a civil war. It was the company's attempt to target the gamer demographic. Except any janitorial chores are skipped in favor of an Event Flag (instead of being interactive like Viscera Cleanup Detail). The game ultimately sold poorly, causing the developers to go on an epic Creator Breakdown-fueled Twitter rant against gamers and the gaming industry, and then stopped making commercial projects.
• The flagship franchises of Team Ninja get this sometimes.
  • Ninja Gaiden is ludicrously difficult, to the point of scaring off casual audiences. Team Ninja seems aware of this to some degree and have made fun of it a few times.
  • Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z, a Gaiden Game (ironically, in a series with "Gaiden" already in its English title) revolving around a brand new character who's the arrogant, crude, foul-mouthed antithesis to Ryu who's out to kill him (which obviously is never going to happen), plays more like God of War than Ninja Gaiden, and despite playing as a ninja there isn't even a jump button. Ryu's involvement is the only thing making this a Ninja Gaiden game aside from the title. It also isn't hard enough to appeal to the Ninja Gaiden-loving demographic, but people outside the demographic would likely be scared away by the Ninja Gaiden label. Ultimately the was critically lambasted and just barely sold 100k copies, when even the original release of Ninja Gaiden 3 (considered the worst of the mainline games) sold over half a million.
  • The Deception series has nowhere near the recognition or mainstream appeal of Dead or Alive, and a look at the premise makes it easy to guess why: You play as a dyed-in-the-wool Villain Protagonist, in service to the Satan, who tortures and kills numerous victims that enter your lair with death traps of increasing sadism and cruelty. Some of them are brigands and bandits, but the vast majority of those you kill are good, sympathetic characters that would be heroes or allies in any other fantasy game, and the games take great pains to hammer home the latter part by averting What Measure Is a Mook?, showing the lives that you're gleefully and creatively snuffing out as belonging to actual people, with names, personalities, and backstories of their own.
• White supremacist record label Resistance Records has made a number of first-person shooters (Ethnic Cleansing, White Law, and Zog's Nightmare) where you play as a Nazi or Klansman and go around shooting various racial minorities. As you can imagine, the hate agenda promoted by these games means they have little interest to those who aren't racists aside from morbid curiosity, are poison for mainstream distributors, and are such that mainstream streaming platforms such as Twitch refuse to allow streams of them due to policies regarding hate content.

Individual Games

• Agents of Mayhem is a single-player-only Hero Shooter set in a rebooted version of the Saints Row universe, that tried to be both different yet appeal to Saints Row fans all the same. Problem is, Saints Row fans generally hated it, as the series was already off the rails beforehand to the base's contention, and this game ended up looking like a watered-down Saturday morning cartoon. Going Lighter and Softer also didn't appeal to fans who generally liked that it worked hard to get an M-rating. At the same time, it was also an attempt to appeal to fans of hero shooters like Overwatch, with its colorful cast of characters with unique abilities, but failed at that by virtue of the aforementioned fact that it only has single-player. Its gameplay was highly derivative of other games, and unlike previous Saints Row entries, had none of the style that made it stand out through its derivative nature. When the game released, it immediately bombed so hard that Volition was forced to lay off over 30 employees, and pull out of any plans for the franchise. Though it barely avoided becoming a Creator Killer, the next game wasn't so lucky - after THQ Nordic's acquisition of Volition's parent company Koch Media, the next proper Saints Row game was a Continuity Reboot that bombed commercially and led to Volition being dissolved on August 31, 2023. This understandably has some concerned about the long-term fate of the franchise, with some fearing that Agents of Mayhem caused lasting damage to it that it may not recover from. Best summed up by Tyler J. of Cleanprincegaming during his retrospect of the series.
  Tyler J.: The game is a Hero Shooter, set in the Saints Row universe, that gets next to everything wrong. It retains the superhero ideals of Saints Row IV, but stuffs them into a hero shooter — a class-based hero shooter at that, and removes what makes hero shooters interesting in the process — the multiplayer. It's a game where you take out a team of three heroes and fight evil, all by yourself. An absolutely befuddling decision from a design perspective, and an incredibly strange choice in general.
• Akiba's Trip is a wacky game set in Tokyo's famous Otaku-centric district Akihabara and it's very authentic compared to the real thing... until you realize that the gameplay is about fighting a gang of artificial vampires by tearing their clothes off (in some cases including underwear) to expose them to sunlight. It even seems the development team picked up on Western reactions to the game since the spiritual successor Akiba's Beat was a complete revamp gameplay-wise with almost none of the stripping involved. Akiba's Beat ended up selling poorly because of the Cliché Storm, and the next spiritual successor after Akiba's Beat will be a Slice of Life set in a post-apocalyptic Akihabara. However said spiritual successor end up being Vaporware and as of 2022, the second game of Akiba's Trip series got a rerelease that adds a new storyline involving a side character.
• Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival suffered from this. The Genre Shift from the life simulation games the franchise was known for to a board game didn't please fans who wanted a new Wii U Animal Crossing. The game was intended as a party game, but the main mode, unlike other party games like Mario Party didn't have any minigames. Instead, the game was nearly entirely based on luck. There were minigames to play, but some required extra amiibo cards. One of the minigames was a quiz on Animal Crossing trivia, which didn't help the game appeal to newcomers. Other minigames required the players to play the dull main game for some time. This resulted in a critical and commercial failure.
• Armed & Delirious, a point-and-click Adventure Game in which a granny with dementia explores strange alien worlds to rescue her family... which consists of animal torturers who were captured by a rabbit as revenge for the unethical experiments they performed on him. Granny herself has to engage in cruelty against almost everyone and everything she encounters in order to progress, so from the get-go we have an utterly unlikable protagonist with an unsympathetic goal. The marketing for the game also repeatedly emphasized how bizarre and nonsensical the game is^note the few people who have played it claim it feels like it was written by an actual person with dementia, despite the manual insisting otherwise, even though not making sense is usually considered a bad thing for an adventure game, a genre where the gameplay revolves around figuring out solutions to various puzzles. Is it any wonder this would be the last game Makh-Shevet, who previously localized adventure games for the Israeli market, would work on before filing for bankruptcy?
• Armored Core Ninebreaker has an Excuse Plot that you've been inducted in a training regiment designed to improve the player's understanding of Armored Core's gameplay, so rather than doing missions as a mercenary, you instead take ranked tests on simple tasks like avoiding missiles or jumping on moving platforms. The pitch of "A game that's mostly a series of mini-tutorials" is already a turn-off to many since most players simply don't find tutorials to be very fun, and was an especially big source of derision here since Armored Core games were infamous for being strictly iterative, so the premise invited many jokes about why they'd make the ninth installment in a yearly series a big tutorial. The game was a lousy seller and while it's since found a small niche with PvP fans who appreciate it for lacking the disliked mechanics of the two games it's sandwiched in-between, its reputation as "A game that's just a tutorial" still dogs it.
• Artifact is a digital card game based on Dota 2. The game was immediately savaged upon announcement (including a meme-worthy video clip of an auditorium full of disappointed groans), and faded into obscurity a few weeks after release. There were a few reasons why the game failed so badly:
  • Valve is a company that is known for innovating the First-Person Shooter genre incrementally through their major titles from Half-Life to Portal and Team Fortress 2, and for helping popular modders to release their mods as standalone games such as Counter-Strike and Dota 2. Seeing Valve focusing development on a Hearthstone and Shadowverse play-alike Collectible Card Game (a genre that is niche and, as of the online era, dominated by free-to-play games except for collectors and serious gamers, including the two aforementioned games), with the only innovation being three-lane gameplay, left a lot of fans bitter and feeling that Valve was abandoning its other franchises.
  • Not only was the game paid-for instead of being free-to-play, new cards could only be earned through microtransactions and trading between players. The logic behind this was to ensure that cards would have real value in the Player-Generated Economy, since allowing cards to be earned for free would lead to devaluation over time. This alienated both newcomers (who are more used to free-to-play CCGs due to their accessibility) and serious gamers (who prefer "real" as in physical CCG such as Magic: The Gathering). The late 2010s also saw microtransactions face increasing backlash and controversy, so a game where you had to pay upfront for the game itself and were then expected to buy more cards with more real money was doomed from the start.
  • The game's failure was so great that Valve announced in 2020 that they would scrap it and rework it significantly, with one of the first major changes being that cards would be earned through gameplay rather than purchased. However, this version was later scrapped in favor of just making Artifact free-to-play (under the title Artifact Classic) and giving all cards for free (players who paid for cards were compensated by having their cards converted into special Collector's Edition cards that can be sold and traded on the Steam market and being given the exclusive ability to earn more Collector's Edition card packs by playing matches). The beta of the reworked version, Artifact Foundry, was also released for free, although cards need to be unlocked through play in that version.
• This was a big reason why Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts tanked in sales. Many old time fans were either furious or simply turned off by the fact that they were getting a new Banjo-Kazooie game after years of waiting, only for the art style and platforming of the original games to be completely thrown out for a borderline In Name Only vehicle-based follow up. The game's potentially obnoxious humor further angered fans, many finding it to be outright insulting with how much it mocks old platformers and the fans of Banjo-Kazooie. The game would end up becoming a Franchise Killer for the series for years. All that said though the game would find its audience, mainly with gamers who were not familiar with the previous games who quickly latched on to its incredible vehicle creation. The game would eventually be Vindicated by History by fans who returned to the game and found that, while it wasn’t quite a Banjo-Kazooie game, it was a solid game in its own right and much better than originally thought (and Rare’s slew of poorly received games afterward also helped Nuts N’ Bolts look better in comparison).
• Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon is so divorced in tone, themes, and gameplay from than any other installment in the Bayonetta series that it isn't surprising that it is also the worst-selling game in the franchise. The game is a child-friendly fairytale affair (featuring storybook visuals to match) loosely based on Celtic mythology, starring a teenage Bayonetta searching for her mother; this is in stark contrast to the mature-rated, blood-soaked apocalyptic save-the-world affairs that play with Christian motifs and star an adult Bayonetta who serves as a Third-Person Seductress. In addition to this, Cereza and the Lost Demon is a slow-paced Action-Adventure/Puzzle title utilizing a quirky "one controller, two characters" control scheme, while the rest of the series is what helped codify the fast-paced Stylish Action genre. As a result, while the game garnered positive reviews, existing fans were left disinterested because — spin-off or not — it didn't feel like Bayonetta.
• Battleborn failed largely because it couldn't successfully sell its cartoony Hero Shooter/MOBA concept. MOBA fans were turned off by the game's First-Person Shooter elements, which made it difficult to execute the complex strategies common within the genre. Shooter fans were turned off by the MOBA mechanics, which they felt added unnecessary complexity. Casual gamers dismissed the game as a knockoff of Blizzard's then-upcoming Overwatch just because it too has heroes, a colorful art style and a first person shooter perspective. The game's launch failed to do it any favors, as developer Gearbox intentionally challenged Overwatch by sharing the same month of release and taking potshots at Blizzard's game, which only led to unfavorable comparisons and prevented people from judging the game on its own merits. Then there were the negative feelings from Gearbox's poorly-received Aliens: Colonial Marines, that tarnished the studio's image and turned off potential audiences still incensed by that game. Yet the biggest hurdle to Battleborn' was its initial $60 retail price, which acted as a paywall to entry; had the game launched as a free-to-play title, then it would've not only been more palatable to the MOBA audience, who generally prefer their games to be F2P, but could've also fulfilled the role of a more affordable alternative to Overwatch and made the game more accessible to skeptical gamers. Although Battleborn attempted to go F2P with a free trial mode, by then Paladins had already filled that niche as a freemium hero shooter and had siphoned away any players who would've otherwise gravitated towards Battleborn.
• Bear Stearns Bravo is a comedic satire of the 2007-08 financial crisis, created not long after the crisis happened, complete with using the real Bear Stearns bank as the villains. Combine this with the fact that the game was the big reveal of the Pronunciation Book 71-day dramatic countdown as well as the climax of the related @horse_ebooks Twitter account, and the result was a game that introduces a jarring Genre Shift from drama and intrigue to comedy, is about a subject that many people wanted to forget about or have no interest in, and marked the end of both a long-anticipated countdown and a fan-favorite Twitter account. Those who could look past that were turned away by the fact that you originally had to pay $7 to access Second Impact. As a result, most followers of Pronunciation Book and @horse_ebooks reacted negatively to the announcement, not many people played, and the third chapter was never completed. It ended up being a Creator Killer for Syndyne.
• Seta's Bio Force Ape is a famous cancelled NES game known for its offbeat premise and surprisingly excellent graphics, and all of those traits are directly related. The game is a fast-paced side-scrolling Beat 'em Up featuring a genetically-altered, diaper-wearing chimpanzee man who performs pro-wrestling moves on his enemies, but it was quietly cancelled before its slated 1992 release. While an official reason for why hasn't been confirmed, former Seta USA director Chuck Vowell suggested that in combination with worries about the speculated build costs for the game's graphics technology (which allowed for the screen scrolling that gives the game its remarkably high speed for the NES), publishers found the game's plot too weird to ever turn a profit, so it was shelved. The game would eventually receive Cult Classic status, but primarily as a bit of NES-era folklore that only became a "reality" when its prototype ROM was discovered and dumped online in 2010.
• Bomberman Act:Zero being a Darker and Edgier take on a cutesy mascot was already a red flag, and the developer also ruining the gameplay (no local multiplayer, and a single player mode consisting of 99 levels with no lives, no continues, and no saving) ensured no one would be interested in playing. The franchise swiftly reversed course after Act:Zero's underperformance and brought back the original designs, to nobody's surprise.
• Captain Novolin is a SNES platformer based on... diabetes? And yes, the enemies are all sugary sweets trying to hunt you down. The fact that it's just not a well-made game to begin with (weird control scheme, floaty jumping, the sprites are too big, repetitive level design, etc...) certainly did not help sales, which were further hampered by the game needing a prescription to buy in some areas, and most people only knew of its existence years after the fact when it became a fixture of 2000s-era Caustic Critic comedy sites and "worst games ever" clickbait videos on YouTube.^note Captain Novolin was part of a series of similarly themed SNES games that are even more obscure (including one based on asthma and another that's basically Innerspace: The Game) published by a company called Raya Systems, all of which are noted for actually being quite educational and accurate with regards to the medical stuff but otherwise being rotten, awful, wretched, just terrible games.
• Can't Escape The Heroine revolves around about the player character being raped by Cute Monster Girls, which is played for Fanservice and has been a no-no for many potential buyers.
• Chibi-Robo!: Zip Lash has this as a commonly given reason for why it bombed. Chibi Robo was already a niche franchise as it was, being a series of third-person action-adventure games based around cleaning a home as a miniature robot. Zip Lash tried to rectify this by being a borderline-In Name Only Soft Reboot into a 2D platform game, but only served to anger its small-but-devoted fanbase due to the genre shift. Meanwhile, the series' poor name recognition due to years of poor marketing meant everyone else still remained just as uncaring as before. It definitely didn't help that it was a particularly bland platformer with odd mechanics as well, such as the ability to progress to further stages being based on chance by way of a roulette wheel. It was additionally released at the height of Nintendo pumping out side-scrolling 2D platformers during the early to mid-2010s, by which point the audience for such games was quite saturated, leaving little interest in yet another one being released on the aging 3DS.
• Cho Aniki is a Shoot 'Em Up with muscular guys in speedos and visual innuendo. It's bound to make anybody not into Macho Camp deeply uncomfortable. While the series has a cult following, it's mostly due to Bile Fascination (which is likely what the creators intended given how utterly bizarre the series is).
• Code Name: S.T.E.A.M requires its audience to be fans of (or at least have an interest in) four different topics: Turn-Based Strategy games, the art and motifs of American comic books, classic literature, and steampunk. It's a very well-done strategy game, being created by the same people behind the Fire Emblem and Nintendo Wars series, but finding anyone who deeply shared more than two of those interests was a tall order and the game quickly found its way into bargain bins. It certainly didn't help that, prior to a patch released a few months after its release, the game was slow as molasses to play thanks to the inability to fast-forward or skip enemy turns, greatly diminishing its critical reception.
• Criminal Girls and its sequel Criminal Girls 2: Party Favors are above-average dungeon crawlers with excellent characterization, but good luck getting anyone to see beyond the Squicky premise about beating and torturing teenage girls into subservience.
• A large chunk of what harmed the standalone version of DayZ was that the developers declared fairly early on that it would be based on the original mod. This might not sound like a big issue, except that at the time, there were dozens of different variants spread out across many different servers, and even servers that did play something close to the original mod usually added some things to spice it up. By that point, the fanbase had cut its teeth on the more heavily modded variants that did things like flesh out the combat system, add extensive base-building mechanics, or even just put in new encounters and enemy types. This resulted in the eventual standalone version feeling very barebones, since it was essentially starting over from square one without any of what the fans had come to expect. It certainly didn't help that various other indie games at the time were starting to pull the best ideas from those mods, meaning the players could get an experience like what they'd had with modded DayZ in a ton of games, but not the game calling itself by that name.
• Death Smiles, a side-scrolling Shoot 'Em Up by CAVE, got a lot of flak for the Gothic Lolita artwork of the game. Most of it is nice, tasteful and beautiful, but too many instances of pre-teen girls getting sensual with each other (including a bubble bath scene) has gotten the game an ill reputation among fans, mainly Americans. Most shoot-'em-up fans will warn potential players to ignore the artwork for the intricate gameplay for a reason. It was because of this that the game never got a general release in the West (only the Collector's Edition is available) and the sequel didn't get an English translation until the Compilation Re-release of Deathsmiles I + II in 2021.
• Demonophobia is a Survival Horror H-Game in which you play as a teenage girl and expected via Trial-and-Error Gameplay to die in all sorts of gruesome and brutal ways — and it's played for Fanservice. The rampant Squick on display naturally scared off anybody not morbidly curious and/or interested in the niche of Interplay of Sex and Violence, and they would get tired of having to repeatedly see violent and sexual content while going through the numerous hoops to either find all of the death animations, or actually beat the game. Predictably, its graphic subject matter has made it impossible to be released on mainstream sites like Steam, instead having to be downloaded via underground filesharing sites, and it took its developer over a decade of outright radio silence to officially unveil a Creator-Driven Successor.
• Doki Doki Majo Shinpan! is this in the West. The game is about a witch hunt that involves molesting teenage girls and rummaging through their belongings. While this game beat even The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass in pre-order sales in Japan and China, it was just too disturbing to Westerners — so much so that reviewers like NGamer denied it any ratings whatsoever. Needless to say, it never got a release outside the East.
• Donkey Kong:
  • Donkey Kong 3 was released right around the time of the Great Video Game Crash, which would have left most projects with an uphill battle, but it did itself no favors in its design and premise. While the older Donkey Kong games were platformers, 3 went for a vertical shooter route—the exact genre that Donkey Kong had set itself apart from by not being, as it was a very saturated genre at the time. The In Name Only aspects don't stop at the gameplay, though, as Jumpman/Mario is also absent (having found his way to the more successful Mario Bros.), and the overall premise of the game is based around warding Donkey Kong off by spraying his butt with bug spray, which would likely be a pretty unappealing and weird concept for a shoot-em-up even on the best of days. Though the game didn't do horribly in Japan, it flopped hard in America (historically Donkey Kong's biggest stronghold), and put the franchise on hold for eleven years.
  • Donkey Kong Jungle Beat was created during a slump period for the Donkey Kong series, at a time when Nintendo was attempting to experiment with the DK Bongos peripheral created for Donkey Konga. Consequently, despite being a 2D platformer, the game is designed to use the Bongos as its main control method. Though most people to have played the game note that the Bongos work surprisingly well, the idea of controlling a non-rhythm game with a plastic drum kit proved a bit too weird for most consumers, and the Bongos were a separate accessory that cost twenty dollars (the game can certainly be played without them, but many didn't realize this). Even divorced from that, the game also ticked off Donkey Kong Country fans by featuring few to no elements from those games barring Donkey Kong's design, leading them to view it as another gimmicky sidegame instead of a triumphant return. Though the game consistently reviewed well, it underperformed in sales.
  • Donkey Kong Barrel Blast was the last attempt to do something with the DK Bongos... sort of. The original premise of the game was that it was a racing game controlled with the Bongos, using drumming and clapping to control your speed and movement. However, when the game was moved to the Wii, the concept shifted late in development to instead be based on flailing the Wiimote and Nunchuck in a drumming motion, to the point that in the finished product, the Bongos don't even work as an alternate control method. If you were tired of the Bongos and wanted Donkey Kong Country back, this game didn't help matters, if you weren't tired of them, they'd been tossed aside in favor of a much less precise and responsive control scheme, and if you just wanted a game with motion controls, you were positively drowning in options circa 2007. As a result, the game sold unusually badly and reviewed even worse, which seemingly convinced Nintendo to bring the franchise back to its traditional platformer days.
• Double Dragon III: The Rosetta Stone is (naturally) the third game of the Double Dragon series but with one gimmick: there are no weapons or powerups, and you must buy them from the "coin shop" with real money. This felt too ridiculous for gamers that don't like to pay extra quarters to power up their character (especially when the competition between arcade games was tight), and the game nearly killed off the Double Dragon franchise. The updated Japanese release took out the coin shop entirely (giving the player the weapons and powerups as they normally progress) and the console ports make it more of a traditional beat-'em-up.
• Drakengard 3 is, at face value, a prequel of the first game that doesn't directly tie-in with the first game's events in any visible way. The protagonist is a revered goddess-turned-traitor and a genocidal sex-maniac bent on killing her divine sisters in order to steal their powers for herself while killing their helpless followers who are unable to stop her. The game undergoes Reverse Cerebus Syndrome for a franchise that thrived on its extensive use of dark, disturbing, and hopeless atmospheres; instead it relies far more on raunchy humor to carry out its dialogue. The game's protagonist is also a Sir Swears-a-Lot who uses some of the strongest swears known to English-speakers constantly, despite the first Drakengard and Drakengard 2 only using E10+-rated swears at worst. The maligned sluggish, unrefreshing gameplay that the series is infamous for has not been rectified, and many players also suffered from poor framerates when playing on top of that. Needless to say, it sold far worse than the first Drakengard, selling a measly 150,000 copies within five months of release. In contrast, the first Drakengard sold over 240,000 copies in its first four months of release. The very next game in the franchise, NieR: Automata would move to a more appealing futuristic android-based setting and rectified many of these gameplay setbacks to sell over 4 million copies in two years.
• EarthBound (1994): A JRPG set in the modern world, with weird enemies like spiteful crows, Starmen, animated parking meters and cups of coffee, and (of course) New Age Retro Hippies, and with other twists on the JRPG genre like trash cans and random presents replacing treasure chests, the game was already a hard sell to RPG fans who were already used to medieval fantasy series like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. But it was the marketing (especially in America) that did the most harm: The advertisements exaggerated the adult humor and gross-out comedy (with an infamous Nintendo Power issue giving gross-out scratch-and-sniff cards for would-be gamers!) that it had little of, and explained even less of what the game was about other than the tagline, "This Game Stinks!". It also didn't help that it was released near the end of the Super Nintendo's lifecycle, while everyone was waiting for the next-generation consoles and especially their games. Also that the game was retailed at $70^note about $145 US in today's money, higher than most other games due to being packaged in a large box containing a player's guide book. The game was a titanic flop, with many copies sold for ten dollars or less and often destroyed to make way for the next generation of games. Thankfully, years later, the game was Vindicated by History and today is one of the most recognized RPGs of the Super Nintendo era, and would go on to inspire a slew of successors like Undertale, LISA, and OMORI that became successful in their own right.
• The Taiwanese fighting game Fight Of Gods wouldn't be so alienating if it didn't include different real-life religions' gods and other sacred figures like Jesus, The Buddha, and various Japanese gods. This is one reason why Steam once got banned in Malaysia^note although Valve had removed the game from Steam four days before the ban. A lot of people aren't into it because of blasphemous implications. Fortunately, the controversy benefitted the game in the West, but the game's sequel, Fight of Animals, went for a Lighter and Softer route by basing its characters on pseudo-muscular animal memes, to a better reception.
• Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon was a deliberate attempt at Revisiting the Roots after Radiant Dawn's failure, but it ran into issues with its premise. Rather than the increased focus on plot and characterization and the rather overstuffed systems of the prior games, it went with an idea of Emergent Narrative, with a much less complex plot and supports being mostly removed, as well as the overall strength of player units being toned down and a class-change system added to grant a level of customization. Additionally, many subsystems were put in place to favor "Iron Man" (no resetting) gameplay, such as filling your party with replacement units if too many characters suffered Permadeath. Unfortunately, one of these systems—that the game's bonus chapters, all of which contained recruitable characters, could only be reached with a large number of dead units—sparked a very significant backlash. Though it was intended as a Mercy Mode to help struggling players train up and provide replay value, it was instead widely viewed by the player base, which had long since been trained to reset on the death of any unit, as forcing you to kill off your party to see all the game's content. Additionally, due to "perfect runs" being highly desirable in prior games, instead of playing the game many different ways and building a story, most players played the game once and made sure to see as much as they could without killing units, resulting in a bland game where most units had no individual personality and seemed to all work the same, and its sales saw little improvement over Radiant Dawn. Though the game would be Vindicated by History somewhat in later years, due to a strong engine and various Iron Man runs on YouTube, it's still never escaped the stigma of being "the game where you kill your own units."
• The gimmick of The Flock was that every time a player died, the virtual population would decrease by one. Once it hit zero, the game would no longer be buyable to new players, and the players who had bought it could play a finale, after which the game would be gone for good. While this move got a lot of attention, it ended up being one of the reasons for the game's failure, as the idea of buying a game with a built-in expiration date scared off many potential players.
• Girl's RPG Cinderellife is a game by Level-5 aimed at young girls... About working at a Hostess Club. It's rated 15+, but the game uses simple language with furigana so young kids who don't know kanji yet could play. The game has been criticized for romanticizing the not-so-glamorous life of a hostess towards young, impressionable girls. Unsurprisingly, the game was a flop.
• Harvester is a 1996 FMV-heavy Point-and-Click horror Adventure Game with a lot of grotesque, disturbing imagery and advertised as "the most violent video game of all time," and in actuality turning out to be a deconstructive satire on Murder Simulators. While the game has since developed a small cult following due to its unique approach toward player-based morality and commentary on the relationship (or lack thereof) between video games and violence, the fact that much of the game's messaging comes from directly transgressing on the players for involving themselves in it makes it a very difficult sell to actually play.
• Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA X attempts to include a story mode unlike previous games. However, this has been criticized by fans as being a poor move that turned away many, since a major part of Vocaloid's appeal was they were interpretive Blank Slates that can be used for anything by anyone, which a story mode in an official Hatsune Miku project greatly goes against, on top of getting in the way of what most people play the series for to begin with, that being the challenging rhythm gameplay. Even those who found the story mode to be interesting, however, were turned off by the story being little more than a basic Excuse Plot that fails to properly flesh out the world and characters in any meaningful way, on top of having almost none of the pre-existing Project Diva lore from previous games. The addition of a story mode and its execution is considered by many to have played a large part in X's underperformance in sales and why later Project Diva games would just stick to the rhythm gameplay going forward. Hatsune Miku: Colorful Stage! would attempt to include a story again and unlike with X, it would fare much better in winning fans over, as it featured an original cast of its own that it can flesh out without interfering with the Virtual Singers, on top of playing with the interpretive nature of the Virtual Singers by exploring them through alternate versions of them as opposed to their base selves, which fans were more okay with.
• Heroes of the Storm, Blizzard's Massive Multiplayer Crossover MOBA, had a lot of hurdles. It attempted to be a casual and accessible game, in a genre infamous for its hardcore and beginner-unfriendly player base. In particular, the Team XP and rigid Damager, Healer, Tank roles greatly lowered the ability for individual skill to shine, turning away the huge crowd that wants to play carry. The premise of Blizzard universes coming together also did the game no favours. While it was appealing to long-time fans, Blizzard's characters don't have the star power to draw in a general audience. Add the fact that, as a PC-only MOBA, it couldn't find a casual audience who wanted a silly party game like Super Smash Bros. has. The game was the black sheep of Blizzard's IPs, which resulted in its pro scene being cancelled and budget getting slashed at the end of 2018 as Blizzard ran into financial troubles. It still has a dedicated fanbase, but it's far smaller than Blizzard's other games or Heroes' rivals, and was eventually abandoned by Blizzard by 2022.
• Homefront was doomed from the moment it thought it was a good idea to have North Korea invading and occupying over half of the United States, which is only modestly compensated by the real-life elements incorporated into the game's backstory. The original premise involved China being the one doing the invasion which is more believable, but this was changed to avoid being Banned in China. The game tries to justify this premise by having North Korea put on a Nice Guy act and having God knows how many South Korean elites in on the plan to subjugate East Asia, but even then players found the story too far fetched to take it seriously. Those who did buy the game found a short story campaign that tried way too hard to make the antagonists practically Nazis, which only fed into the notoriety that kept would-be players from buying the game. Unsurprisingly, even with a release date outside of Call of Duty season (in March), it failed to generate the sales THQ was looking and killed its developer studio Kaos Studios only 3 months later.
• Icons Combat Arena was a free-to-play Platform Fighter by Wavedash Games, a team featuring former members from Super Smash Bros. Brawl Game Mod Project M's dev team. Similarly to PM, it tried to replicate the technical, fast-paced, competition-friendly gameplay Super Smash Bros. Melee as closely as possible, and succeeded too well at that, alienating both competitive Melee fans and casual players in the process:
  • For hardcore Melee players, the game failed to add anything new (although there were some characters with completely original movesets, they were all locked behind a paywall, with free players only getting Captain Ersatzes of Fox, Captain Falcon, and Ganondorf), giving them no reason to switch over to this game when Melee had more content and a more active community, and the existence of emulators with online support meant that the idea of "Melee for PC" wasn't even as novel as expected. Furthermore, the game had a bizarre 6-frame input delay that made the game feel unpleasant to play, making it even less attractive for that audience, who are so sensitive to input lag that they perpetually haul around bulky and long outdated CRT televisions to tournaments to avert it. The use of Loot Boxes for monetization was also an unfortunate blow against the game, since it came around the time where Star Wars Battlefront II (2017) inspired a strong hatred for that system.
  • For casual players, the gameplay had a strong reliance on Melee's advanced techniques and Good Bad Bugs, which were intentionally replicated, and assumed that players were already familiar with them; this meant no tutorials, and made the game extremely inaccessible to anyone outside of the hardcore Melee fandom. The game also had a generic sci-fi aesthetic very similar to Overwatch, making it look uninteresting compared to Super Smash Bros' collection of distinct and recognizable faces.
  • Due to these issues, the game's playerbase dropped rapidly and the servers were shut down shortly after, replaced by a paid Legacy Edition that at least fixed the input issue. AtlasOne goes into more details about the game's failure in this video, contrasting it with the much more successful Rivals of Aether. Akshon Esports also has a video claiming that the game suffered from Uncertain Audience. Fortunately, the developers found more success with Rushdown Revolt, a reboot that features Icons' characters, but with more original mechanics, to a more positive reception.
• JOSH was an Adobe Flash video game... about the dangers of video game addiction, that could be completed in less than 5 minutes and with hardly any gameplay aside from "move your character to the right" outside of a couple of top-down maze segments. Unsurprisingly, its confused messaging and barebones gameplay was swiftly forgotten about.
• Lawbreakers failed as hard as it did because it couldn't adapt to modern audience sensibilities. From the start, game director Cliff Bleszinski intended the game to be a throwback to Darker and Edgier arena shooters in both its gameplay, design and business model. However, the game struggled to capture the hardcore shooter fans since it launched without competitive modes and contained hero shooter elements that undermined its appeal. Any potential hero shooter fans were turned off by gritty art style and generic characters. The marketing didn't do any favors as Cliff took some sly potshots at Overwatch and compared his game to Dark Souls because of its high difficulty, which scared off those looking for a casual experience. The decision not to make an Xbox One port excluded many of Cliff's fans, who he built up through the Xbox-exclusive Gears of War. Furthermore, the Cliff's refusal to pursue a free-to-play model either before or after launch prevented more skeptical fans from trying out the game. Ultimately, the game died a quick death as it couldn't win over gamers in a saturated market that demanded colorful and accessible games.
• Left Behind: Eternal Forces is a Christian RTS game based on the Left Behind book series that received an enormous amount of pre-release publicity due to its controversial premise: in the single player mode, you play as a member of a Christian militia left behind following the Rapture to fight against the Global Community run by The Antichrist, while also converting people to Christianity. This attracted a polarizing response from critics, with some (including infamous anti-video game activist Jack Thompson) criticizing the game for endorsing religious warfare, while others were more confused as to who the intended audience was supposed to be — fundamentalist Christians were largely annoyed by how the game caricaturizes basic Christian doctrine (as well as finding the multiplayer mode, where you can play on the side of the Antichrist-led Global Community, distasteful for obvious reasons), and non-Christians felt the whole idea was ridiculous, not helped by how despite the controversies, committing violence and combat is strongly discouraged as it reduces the morale of your team and causes members to abandon your cause, meaning a bulk of what the game is "supposed" to be largely consists of converting people to Christianity. Despite heavy marketing and the controversy priming it to be at least worth watching, the game was released to mediocre-to-negative reviews and sold very poorly, quickly fading into obscurity.
• The Lord of the Rings: Gollum got a very skeptical response out of the gate on its unveiling. As iconic as he is, Gollum is a Tragic Villain who lacks seemingly any admirable qualities and is mostly sympathetic because of how miserable his life is—in short, not a character most people would want to play as. Gollum's capabilities also more or less limits the actual gameplay to pure stealth with no combat, something that has always been a bit niche (mainstream stealth games almost always give the protagonist at least some level of fighting ability), as well as at odds with most other Lord of the Rings adaptations being action-focused. On top of all that, Gollum launched with a pricetag of sixty dollars plus DLC, something normally associated with mass-appealing AAA games. Though the Obvious Beta launch did the game no favors, it sold abysmally and didn't review much better.
• Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects: After the success of Marvel vs. Capcom, Marvel Comics had the idea of doing a similar thing with Electronic Arts and creating a fighting game where Marvel's characters faced off against EA's. There was one problem with this: Capcom had a lot of popular properties to pull from, several of which were fighting games, whereas EA in the early 2000s was mainly known for sports titles, licensed games, and The Sims—not exactly a killer lineup for a clash of the titans. To counteract this, the idea changed to EA creating the Imperfects, an Original Generation of characters to fit into the Marvel universe, leading to the game going from "Marvel vs. EA" to Rise of the Imperfects. Unfortunately, this turned out to be, if anything, a worse idea than a game where Spider-Man and Wolverine fight Brett Favre and Cristiano Ronaldo, because now the game was basically a pure Marvel game, but with half the roster and almost the entire story mode being dedicated to a bunch of completely new characters. Even if the Imperfects had been executed perfectly, that would have left the game with quite the uphill battle for acceptance—that the execution of the idea ended up being a bunch of unappealing-looking anti-heroes who spend most of the story fighting or even killing the established Marvel cast was just a cherry on top. Consequently, the game sold badly and reviewed worse, and the Imperfects, clearly set up to be something bigger, have not appeared since.
• Medarot: Girl's Mission attempted to cash-in on the success of then-recent Fanservice-heavy hits like Senran Kagura, sporting a busty all-female cast and Clothing Damage as an explicit gameplay mechanic. Existing Medabots fans were furious at the Hotter and Sexier bent while newcomers were liable to overlook the game due to its associated with a historically chaste and kid-friendly property, and that the sexy stuff isn't pushed as far as it looks, with the aforementioned clothing damage being nearly impossible to achieve in normal gameplay. The game sold poorly and its failure lead a five-years hiatus in Medabots game releases. While those that played it tend to agree the actual gameplay is good and a decent improvement over its predecessor Medarot Dual, discussions on its controversial presentation choices largely overshadow it.
• Metroid Prime: Federation Force is a squad-based multiplayer shooter Spin-Off in a franchise known for isolating the player in a world where Everything Is Trying to Kill You with a focus on exploration. And as part of this premise, you couldn't play as series protagonist Samus Aran; instead A Space Marine Is You. In addition, the game shifted away from the franchise's typically grounded art style to more light-hearted Super-Deformed designs. Fans may have still given it a chance if it wasn't for the fact that it was also the first Metroid game released in six years, and the last entry was so despised that fans had zero interest in anything that wasn't back-to-basics. Thankfully, they got exactly that with Metroid: Samus Returns the following year, which did well enough to convince Nintendo to greenlight the long awaited Metroid Dread, successfully reviving the series.
• Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City is a platformer in which Michael Jordan has to rescue the Chicago Bulls from a mad scientist. Despite being a well-made game, it gets a bad reputation from the premise alone and is often unfavorably compared to Shaq Fu. It doesn't help that both games were released by the same developer in the same year (late 1994).
• Namu Amida Butsu! -UTENA- is a KanColle-esque Card Battle Game featuring a Cast Full of Pretty Boys with wacky personalities, except said pretty boys are Buddhas. It's safe to assume this game doesn't look too good to people outside Japan due to blasphemous implications, and the servers were terminated at the end of August 2020, less than two years after it launched.
• New Tales from the Borderlands initially excited fans when it was first announced on the principle of it being a successor to the fan-favorite Tales from the Borderlands, but the faith took an immediate nosedive when it was revealed that not only would it not be following the unresolved cliffhanger left behind from its predecessor, it would instead be focused an almost entirely new cast with an entirely new story, which developers described as being "an interactive sitcom". Fans were turned off as this meant there wasn't going to be any fan-favorite or otherwise noteworthy characters from any of the previous Borderlands games, and Borderlands as a whole had begun receiving increasing backlash for its progressively mediocre comedy, so a game focused entirely around it without the more critically-acclaimed dramatic bits only served to scare them off even further. The issues with tone and premise are often compared to that of Borderlands 3, which too received complaints for its writing, but ended up selling impressively on account of its well-received gameplay — with New Tales being an Adventure Game, exciting and dynamic gameplay was a pro it could not possess. Whereas Tales is known for selling poorly, but being loved by fans and critics, New Tales sold even worse and reception has been substantially less kind across the board.
• Pooplers involves you being a baby... against 3 other babies... slowly covering the floor... in literal shit. With obnoxious sound effects all throughout. No wonder it proved to be a flop.
• Pulse Racer is a futuristic Mascot Racer whose big gimmick is that your driver gets a heart attack if you use the boost too much. Predictably, every outlet that reviewed it questioned the wisdom of making a racing game that actively punishes players for going fast and the game was a massive critical and financial failure as a result, being widely considered one of the worst games for the original Xbox.
• The Quiet Man is a melee-combat focused game whose premise is that the protagonist's deafness is represented by having gameplay and most of the cutscenes be completely silent aside from subtle droning noises and muffled punching and kicking sounds (and the cutscenes aren't subtitled^note although an update was later released which allows players to restore the sound during New Game Plus, which doesn't even have Gameplay and Story Integration as justification because the main character does understand what's being said while players are left to piece together the story themselves). Even if the game had been more competently-made in other respects, several reviews and social reactions started with openly wondering why anyone thought this was a good hook.
• Radiant Silvergun is a shmup with many odd mechanics — you start with many sorts of weapons, but is based off what combination of buttons you press. This can be very confusing for both newcomers and shmup veterans, who would likely drop the game long before they can get used to it. The combo system, vital for a high score and to power up your weapons (lest it be nearly impossible to play) can also throw many players off, especially when they have to avoid shooting the majority of enemies and evade them when they can, quite the opposite of what players are used to. The insanely depressing story where all of life on Earth is destroyed at the start and you also die in the end resolving nothing no matter what doesn't help, either. These factors kept it a niche solely on the Sega Saturn and did not leave the country or system until 2011, thirteen years after its initial release. Though as the years passed, the game was more warmly received for its uniqueness in a sea of shmups.
• Rapelay is a rape simulator, so it naturally repels anyone who isn't into such content. And even within the niche market for rape/sexual assault-themed visual novels, the game is seen as boring for its stale gameplay mechanics that amount to "Hold down mouse button, watch bar fill".
• The Sakura Wars:
  • The short-lived mobile spinoff Sakura Revolution (Sakura Kakumei: Hansaku Otome-tachi in Japan). It's a gacha game that features none of the recognizable characters from either the classic Sakura Wars titles nor the then-recent Sakura Wars (2019), and so lacked the star power which would have gotten fans of either era of the series interested. Additionally, Sakura Revolution was set in the 2000s, instead of the unique steampunk Taisho-era Japan the main series is set in, alienating the fanbase even more. On top of completely abandoning the two strongest points of the Sakura Wars series, the game also failed to offer anything that could entice fans of other gacha games, be its gameplay mechanices or even simple Fanservice. It's telling that after a mere six months of service Sega and developer Delightworks decided to put the game out of its misery.
  • Sakura Wars (2019): Many older fans of the franchise weren't happy that most of the original cast from the earlier games were effectively Put on a Bus, nor did they appreciate the Genre Shift from turn based tactics to third person action.
• Saints Row (2022) is a Continuity Reboot of the Saints Row series, where the Saints are formed by a group of college students, that intended to bring the series' focus on gang warfare back after The Third and IV went in a Denser and Wackier direction. Longtime fans who wanted a reboot were put off by the complete continuity reset, while non-fans felt the story and cast were clichéd and underdeveloped. The game bombed critically, leading to Volition being merged into Gearbox Software before dissolving just a year after its release.
• Shaq Fu was doomed from the moment someone decided it would be a smart idea to try and float a fighting game on the star power of a professional athlete. Fans of fighting games walked past it because it focused on Shaquille O'Neal throwing punches at martial arts champions in "the Second World", fans of sports games passed it up because it didn't focus on Shaq throwing down dunks in the court, and fans of both genres simply weren't interested in such a mediocre game playing the unbelievably ludicrous concept of Shaq using mystical basketball arts to fight martial arts champions in a parallel world completely straight.^note This roughly coincided with Shaq's attempts at both acting and rapping also receiving pretty terrible reviews, he took the hint and outside of a handful of appearances in Professional Wrestling (where 7 foot tall guys are always welcomed with open arms) he's stuck to basketball related pursuits since the late 90s, where he's done quite well for himself Despite all this a long not at all awaited sequel was released in 2018 and also got pretty miserable reviews, though not to the point that it will be showing up on "Worst Games Ever" clickbait like the first one.
• Sonic Labyrinth is an isometric 3D game for the Game Gear where the box art’s Excuse Plot outright says is one where Sonic was tricked into wearing shoes that robbed him of his famous Super-Speed. Needless to say, a game that explicitly outlines the lack of what made the series iconic was a tough sell to most consumers. It has since gained a reputation as being among the worst games in the franchise, and has gotten very few re-releases in the years since.
• Spec Ops: The Line looked like a typical war shooter while telling a tale of madness, despair, and horror. The kind of player who might appreciate the Whole-Plot Reference to Heart of Darkness would be put off because it looks so much like a modern military shooter, while fans of military shooters weren't likely to be interested in its message or impressed by its gameplay. The game's real audience turned out to be those who weren't fans of modern military shooters or violent video games, though many of them also passed on the game due it looking like every other modern military game from the advertising. The game's lead writer, Walt Williams, acknowledged that the nature of the game made it practically impossible to effectively market, considering that part of the force of the game's narrative comes from it initially resembling a typical military shooter only to pull the rug out from under the player: revealing that the game is a Genre Deconstruction significantly dilutes the impact. For this reason Williams anticipated that the game would not prove to be a massive commercial success but would end up as a Cult Classic.
• SSX
  • SSX Blur was a Wii-exclusive entry in the SSX franchise that used motion controls for its tricks and steering. It turned out that the number of fans who wanted to play using relatively unproven motion controls and people who wanted to play a snowboarding game whose motion controls weren't very reflective of snowboarding was not a large group. The game's failure would then put the series on ice for the next 5 years.
  • SSX (2012): In an effort to revive the series and fit with gaming trends of the time, EA would see SSX re-imagined in a grittier, more serious light as SSX: Deadly Descents. After massive backlash against this move, the tone was lightened significantly but while still trying to have a more realistic and grounded style revolving around snowboarding through dangerous mountains in real life rather than the larger-than-life locations of previous games. In the end fans of the series felt betrayed by the extreme change in tone and lack of SSX's signature bombastic and in-your-face tone. Non-SSX fans didn't bite because arcade snowboarding games had fallen out of style and anyone else who tried it deemed it as So Okay, It's Average. The game undersold and SSX was once again put on ice with no signs of defrosting any time soon.
• Star Gagnant is a 2023 Vertical Scrolling Shooter that, like past games developed by Terarin such as Raging Blasters and Terra Flame, are designed to look and feel more like late 80s and early 90s shmups than modern Bullet Hell shooters. The game also has the involvement of Takahashi Meijin, a former executive of Hudson Soft (themselves a developer of many of the aforementioned shmups, most famously the Star Soldier series) who is famous for once being able to Button Mash 16 times per second. Terarin's and Takahashi's ideas of making a Star Soldier throwback include a "rapid fire" mechanic in which the faster the player taps the fire button, the more powerful their shot will get, while holding down the fire button results in a low-damage "normal" attack. While many players consider this game to be otherwise well-built, the rapid-fire mechanic alone makes a lot of shmup fans do a hard pass, as while this might have been acceptable in the 80s, many gamers today aren't terribly keen on having to rapidly tap a button and risk repetitive-stress injury and/or carpal tunnel syndrome to inflict a reliable amount of damage, let alone over the course of a 30-minute game; a lot of modern shmups have done away with button-mash mechanics. Most players will advise just using a controller with an autofire function, which breaks apart the balance of the game, plus the game will empty out your special meter if it detects a tap rate of more than 16 Hz meaning that if one wants to buy such a controller for this game, they will need to find one that can fire at 15 Hz or less. As a result, this is one of Terarin's most poorly-regarded and worst-selling games, and was quickly forgotten within the year it was released.
• You can't say that the Steel Battalion franchise wasn't at least admirably ambitious with its root concept — making the most robust, "realistic" simulation of piloting a badass Humongous Mecha in video game form — but it's remained incredibly niche and underperformed financially for being perhaps too dedicated:
  • The first two games (2002's Steel Battalion and 2004's Steel Battalion: Line of Contact) required play on a unique, ludicrously complex controller setup resembling an actual tank console (includes 40 buttons, two joysticks, a throttle handle, a radio channel dial, five switches, an eject button, and three foot pedals), ratcheting the game up to a required $200 retail price. That alone would make for an extraordinarily tough sell, but was accentuated worse by the games themselves being unforgivably difficult even if you know exactly how every input works, making the game strictly for the most hardcore of hardcore gamers. The games themselves were ultimately well-reviewed and have become prized collector's items, but not unsurprisingly crashed among general consumers.
  • The third and final title, 2012's Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor, ditched the unique controller to instead be reliant on the Kinect, but it crashed even harder due to the peripheral's general issues of being far more finicky than advertised, with the inability to be dexterous clashing hard with the game's design that requires many different actions to operate a massively complicated machine. This once again completely lost audiences, and while many critics were willing to praise the game for its other features (otherwise highly-polished presentation and compelling plot), the game was ultimately slammed and flopped in sales for the simple fact that the Kinect-based control scheme rendered the game near-impossible to actually play.
• Stretch Panic is about a girl who uses a possessed scarf to fight her demon-possessed sisters. She must exorcise the demons, which require points that you must obtain by pinching and stretching women with comically over-sized breasts (i.e. so big that the rest of the woman is hidden between them) in the game's hub world. The premise was too ludicrous for even diehard Treasure fans (used to such weirdness) and the game fell into obscurity quickly as a result.
• Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League got a pretty dubious response right out of the gate, starting from the title:
  • DC fans had gotten weary of stories involving an evil Justice League, and a game where the explicit objective is to murder them left their fans irritated—particularly when, barring Batman, none of them had gotten any real focus in video games outside of Injustice: Gods Among Us, which had already revolved around the Justice League going rogue. Furthermore, the game focused on the Suicide Squad, a team that was conversely seen as overexposed, and a take on the Squad that fans of the team tend to not like (that is to say, a team of popular villains headlined by Harley Quinn fighting superheroes and cosmic threats, rather than a bunch of expendable C-List Fodder doing political espionage).
  • Then it came out that the game took place in the same universe as the Batman: Arkham Series, meaning that not only would the first appearance of the League in its continuity be as a bunch of expendable bosses, but this would also be the final fate of the widely beloved Arkhamverse Batman. Whether or not Batman was meant to be Killed Off for Real in this game before Kevin Conroy's unexpected death in November 2022 remains a matter of intense debate, but either way, it meant that one of the first things to show up on countless Twitter feeds and Youtube pages before release was Batman getting ignominiously executed in a chair while the Squad lectures him on how much he sucks.
  • And then, to cap it all off, there was the game's genre as a multiplayer-focused live-service looter-shooter—not only was this a genre that had come under fire due to a number of high-budget flops and perceived over-monetization, and not only was it divorced from the games that developer Rocksteady had made their name on, but many found it a bad fit for a game where you play as supervillains, leading to the baffling experience of a guy named "Captain Boomerang" using mainly guns in combat. The game's reviews were mediocre at best, and sales were outright dire for a game of its budget and scope, with Warner Bros. Discovery noting that the game had "fallen short of our expectations" less than a month after its release.
• Tap Sonic Top, a free-to-play Gaiden Game for the DJMAX series, often doesn't hold a large player base for very long due to its disparate gameplay elements. People who are into gacha games for the "waifu" experience don't stay for long since the various idols don't have voiceovers or much of a backstory, while people who are into the DJMAX series aren't too keen on having their scores being held hostage by how lucky they are on the gacha, the RPG Elements, or the usual trappings of free-to-play mobile games (e.g. Play Every Day, Bribing Your Way to Victory, or Freemium Timer). This really only leaves the small niche that don't mind having both things at once. In comparison, the Tap Sonic games that are simply rhythm games generally have better reception than Top does.
• That Dragon, Cancer garnered rave reviews in the tech press and on Steam, but it's about experiencing the viewpoint of a father (who is based on the developer of the game) caring for his baby son, who suffered from (and eventually succumbed to) cancer. The game is an idealized experience of the real-life event of the limited time the father (and the family) had with his son. Needless to say, for a large number of gamers, the subject matter is uncomfortable, and even a large number of those who like tear-jerking works of art were put off by the fact that it was based on a personal real-life event. The game only sold 14,000 copies in its first two months, disappointing the developers.
• Tokyo Mirage Sessions ♯FE: When the game was initially announced, all people had to go on was the idea of the crossover between Shin Megami Tensei and Fire Emblem. That the game was eventually revealed as a very light-hearted JRPG with a focus on the entertainment industry, and where there's not much in the way of actual crossover, was enough to turn off many fans, leading to the game flopping both in Japan and the West despite also garnering a lot of praise for its gameplay. Its rose-tinted view of the Idol Singer industry was also a turn-off for many Western gamers, who tend to be more aware of the harsh realities of the pop music industry, especially for teenagers.
• A Total War Saga: TROY tended to struggle for a while with finding an audience, due to the rather odd approach it took of "the facts behind the myth"—that is to say, it's based on the mythologized era of Mycenaean Greece, but attempts to interpret the myths as having potential "realistic" origins (e.g. centaurs exist, but they're just horse-mounted cavalry). This left the game as something of a feathered fish, because fans who wanted a strictly historical recreation of Mycenaean warfare found the game remained rather fantastical and strange (e.g. hero units and generals capable of One-Man Army feats reminiscent of the Iliad), and fans who wanted essentially Age of Mythology but in the Total War style found the concept of, say, a minotaur being a big guy with a bull skull helmet to be incredibly lame. Ultimately, the developers managed to repair the game's reputation with the third DLC, Mythos, which added two new modes: one all-historical mode with the superpowered hero units and divine powers cut out, and one all-mythology mode where genuine hydras and cyclopes run amok on the battlefield. The original version of the game was now called "Behind the Myth", still available for the handful of players who had enjoyed it from the start.
• Licensed Games have a poor reputation, but it's hard to think of a worse choice of adaption than the 2009 First-Person Shooter Tunnel Rats 1968. The existing property, in this case, was Tunnel Rats, a film that had opened the year before and, despite decent reviews, made less than $36,000 on a budget of $8 million. The film's director was Uwe Boll, a man infamous for making terrible video game movies and challenging his critics to boxing matches. So, based on a movie no one saw, by a highly unpopular director, with gameplay of crawling through interchangeable tunnels disarming booby traps and cutting the ears off of dead Viet Cong. Reviews were extremely negative, a planned XBOX 360 port never happened, and Replay Studios went bankrupt a couple months later.
• Umbrella Corps is a multiplayer-based tactical shooter spin-off of Resident Evil, Capcom's stab at branching the primarily single-player Survival Horror franchise into a less production-intensive genre. This ended up being a worst-of-both-worlds situation — general fans of competitive PVP shooters weren't exactly lacking in bigger-budget alternatives in 2016 (the game was delayed by a month as May 2016 saw the release of Overwatch), Resident Evil fans greatly rejected another multiplayer entry after the heavy co-op focus of Resident Evil 5 and 6 (especially as the more traditional single-player Resident Evil 7: Biohazard was on its way the following year), and all audiences were unimpressed by Umbrella Corps' weak mechanics (especially how the maps are smaller than usual and at most, the game's primary gameplay mode is a 3 versus 3 multiplayer), bland aesthetic, terrible performance (especially how the game uses the Unity engine that was at the time, poorly optimized for console and PC games), and minimal single-player content (somewhat glaringly, the game has no series staple B.O.Ws). The game was virtually dead on arrival, peaking at just 400 simultaneous players in its first year, and has been largely forgotten, especially after Resident Evil 7 returned the series to its previous focus on Survival Horror.
• The Unholy War is a game which combined fast-paced combat with very slow paced turn-based strategy, not targeting any of those two genres' audiences. Action-oriented gamers are scared by the "slow and meticulous" chess-like gameplay while the strategy-oriented gamers are scared by the "quick and dumb" action gameplay.
• Wall Street Kid for the NES. Yeah, a stock market simulator is not exactly a concept with mass appeal, especially when it's being sold on the same 8-bit console as Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda. The demographic primarily consisted of children who wouldn't be interested in such a thing, while adults who would weren't normally buying game consoles for themselves. It also had some very, very boring aesthetics on top of that: unlike a board game approach similar to the Monopoly-inspired Fortune Street, which released only a few years later, Wall Street Kid is mostly the player looking and managing stock options in a menu. As such, you've got a game which was kind of doomed to fail from the start. To make matters worse, it was based off a misguided Japanese fad that anyone could get rich by being smart with the stock market that had little to no interest in the US.
• WarioWare: D.I.Y., as it name indicates, focuses on the idea of making your own comics, music and microgames. Fans who like the previous installments for their simple gameplay and pick-up-and-play appeal would be unlikely to be interested in the complex editor (which requires undergoing a lengthy Auto-Pilot Tutorial before being able to use it) nor sated the sparse and lackluster selection of pre-built microgames^note For comparison, whereas previous WarioWare games included around 200 microgames plus unlockable minigames and toys, the base DIY has 95 microgames, none of which have difficulty levels.. People who were open to the editor focus, meanwhile, would be discouraged by the fact that any games you can produce can only last for a few seconds, and that being released on the Nintendo DS meant the game lacked any ingame hub for players to upload their creations or download other's (due to the system-wide "Friend Codes" system). Additionally, any input is based solely on tapping with the stylus (no dragging or drawing, no microphone or button controls). While the game got great reviews and acquired a loyal cult following, it was a sales flop.
• Electronic Arts decided to jump on the wrestling bandwagon in 1998, signing a licensing deal with WCW and releasing WCW Mayhem in 1999. That game was a sales dud mostly due to circumstances outside of EA's control, mainly the fact that they picked the worst possible time to hitch their horse to WCW^note Case in point, to help promote the game WCW created a PPV called WCW Mayhem... which ended up being the first WCW PPV booked from the ground up by Vince Russo (he also booked Halloween Havoc 1999, but all the TV leading up to that show was done under the previous administration), though generally mediocre reviews and stiff competition from WWF Wrestlemania 2000 (on the Nintendo 64) and WWF Smackdown (on the PlayStation) didn't help. EA decided to go in a different direction with the universally hated WCW Backstage Assault, and here's where the Audience Alienating Premise comes in: it's a wrestling game with no ring. As the name indicates the entire game is just a poor simulation of the backstage fights often seen on wrestling shows (especially during that time period), with none of features or match types seen in most other wrestling games. On top of that it was a glitch-ridden mess that was likely rushed just to get it on store shelves while there was still a WCW to base video games on, and sure enough the wrestling promotion would be out of business about 5 months after Backstage Assault was released. With WCW dead EA came up with the rather odd idea of making another wrestling game, but with rappers instead of wrestlers. While on paper that seems like another example of this trope Def Jam Vendetta was actually released to glowing reviews and strong sales, and Vendetta would later get two sequels.
• Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is exceptionally difficult to market, to put it kindly. Watching one of its trailers, it looks like some sort of student art film project, and your only clue as to what the gameplay is like is that you need to "gather stories"; it's up to you to dive in blind and find out what that entails. The gameplay, such as it is, is wandering around the United States, finding events to witness and people to meet, learning the backstory of sixteen people in particular. It's a very slow burn of a plot, and how much you get out of it is determined by how willing you are to invest in its characters while not being turned off by the main gameplay concept of "a skeleton walking across a map."
• This is often cited for why Yo-kai Watch was a Cash-Cow Franchise in Japan but is less successful elsewhere, despite Nintendo even helping to market some of the earlier releases in the West. The series focuses on youkai, supernatural creatures and spirits in Japanese mythology that have no close analogue in Western folklores. Even a Thinly-Veiled Dub Country Change can't lessen the Japanese influence of Yo-kai Watch, and most kids outside of Japan have never heard of "youkai", so the interest isn't there. The series is also stuck directly competing with Pokémon, with the overlapping elements the two franchises share as children's JRPGs where you collect and battle Mons causing many to deem it a lackluster Pokémon clone before even giving it a chance.
• Ys Strategy is a Real-Time Strategy Spin-Off of Action RPG series Ys. Despite its Long Runner status, Ys remains a niche franchise, more so outside of Japan, thus releasing this title in 2006 turned off a good number of its already small fandom, who didn't sign up for such a different genre. The game is also sets in an Alternate Continuity that has little-to-nothing to do with the main Ys lore, leaving little merit for fans who wanted to play it for the story. Not only was the game passed over for localization in North America, it received middling reviews in Japan and Europe, and was even forgotten quickly by its publisher Falcom, who has ignored its existence since.

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