10 Video Games That KILLED Other Video Games

Now, the business of video game development sure is a tough one, and considerably more secretive than, say, the world of movies or TV. As such, so many more games will be cancelled internally than we'll ever actually hear about. But when a high-profile project gets canned publicly, well, it certainly rubs fans the wrong way. But sometimes the reason is another video game itself, and that's what we're here to talk about today. As I'm Jules, this is WhatCulture.com, and these are 10 video games that killed other video games. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Killed Silent Hills In August 2014, it was announced that a new Silent Hill game Silent Hills was in development at Konami, with Metal Gear Solid's Hideo Kojima collaborating with filmmaker Guillermo del Toro and actor Norman Reedus on the project. The moody, visually stunning playable teaser, also known as P.T., that was released for the game got fans incredibly excited, but in April 2015, Konami abruptly announced that Silent Hills had been cancelled. It later transpired that the game was actually a casualty of the fraught relationship between Konami and that reached a fever pitch during the development of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, which ultimately released a few months after Silent Hills' cancellation. If you believe Konami, Kojima went over budget and over schedule on the project, while Kojima's supporters claimed that Konami forced him to effectively release an unfinished game. Either way, Metal Gear Solid V was the clear result of artistic compromise, and given that rumors emerged in March 2015 that Kojima would leave Konami once development on the game was finished, as he did, it's easy to draw a direct line to Silent Hills getting the Number nine, Among Us killed Among Us 2. A more light-hearted example now, with an original game proving successful enough that the developer simply decided to can their planned sequel and focus on supporting the existing game. Multiplayer social deduction game Among Us was first released back in June 2018, and though it didn't make much of a dent out of the gate, it became a social media phenomenon at the onset of the pandemic in early 2020. That August, developer InnerSloth announced that Among Us 2 was in the works, but just a month later, they backtracked, revealing that the sequel had been cancelled due to expected success, with it becoming one of 2020's best-selling games on Steam. Instead of creating Among Us 2, they decided to focus on updating the original, namely rebuilding the game's dated codebase to allow for more ambitious gameplay elements. Given that Among Us has been a colossal cash cow for the company, InnerSloth was smart to keep supporting the existing version, which also generates microtransaction revenue through cosmetics, rather than rolling the dice on a sequel that may not have persuaded players to open their wallets again. Unlike most other Of the other games on this list, there are probably few fans that are 8. Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two Killed Star Wars 1313 Few cancelled video games have caused as much anguish as Star Wars 1313, a gritty story-driven title revolving around a young Boba Fett which was announced in 2012 by way of a gorgeous reveal Yet less than a year later, the game was announced to have been cancelled following Disney's acquisition of Lucasfilms, at which point all existing LucasArts video game projects were thrown away. Now, one of the primary reasons for Disney's sweeping cancellations was the massive losses incurred by their own video game outfit, Disney Interactive Studios, which between 2008 and 2013 lost a stonking $1.41 billion. And one of the studio's biggest flops of this period was Epic Mickey 2 The Power of Two, which released in 2012. 2012, mere months after Star Wars 1313 was announced, and sold barely 20% of what the first game did within its first month on the market. While Epic Mickey 2 obviously isn't solely to blame for such an outrageous loss, it was seemingly the straw that broke the camel's back. In a case of poor timing, it released just weeks after Disney acquired Lucasfilm, and was Disney Interactive Studios' last commercial flop before they shuttered Lucasfilm a few months later. 7. Haze Killed TimeSplitters 4 A fourth entry into the beloved FPS franchise TimeSplitters was first announced in August 2007, but after developer Free Radical went into administration and was bought out by Crytek in 2009, TimeSplitters 4 was put on hold and effectively cancelled. Though many assumed that Crytek either felt that the third TimeSplitters game, Future Perfect, didn't sell well enough, or they wanted Free Radical to work on their Crysis series, that's not actually why TimeSplitters 4 never materialised. The real reason? The catastrophic critical and commercial failure of Free Radical's last game. 2008's Haze, which had been hyped up as a Halo killer in the media, only to receive aggressively mediocre reviews for its generic FPS gameplay. Despite Free Radical shopping around a playable demo of TimeSplitters 4 to publishers before being acquired by Crytek, Haze's failure had irreversibly tarnished their reputation in the industry, with all publishers passing on the game amid the belief that Free Radical couldn't deliver a commercial hit. And so, the failed ambition of Haze is to blame for TimeSplitters never getting that fourth entry that 6. Halo and Gears of War killed two Perfect Dark sequels Perfect Dark Prequel, Perfect Dark Zero was released as an Xbox 360 launch title in late 2005, and though it didn't set the world alight, Microsoft nevertheless gave Rare the go-ahead to begin work on not one, but two sequels, Perfect Dark Core and Perfect Dark Vengeance. Core was set to have protagonist Joanna Dark travel to Egypt, Russia, and then Saturn's largest moon, Titan, leading into Vengeance, which would tie up the planned trilogy story. Both games were was set to feature parkour elements while drawing narrative influence from Deus Ex, but in 2007, The sequels were both cancelled by Microsoft. One of the motivating factors was Microsoft's belief that Perfect Dark Zero didn't sell enough. But the overarching rationale for scrapping two games? Well, that was to focus on other sci-fi franchises such as Halo and Gears of War, which were practically printing money at the time. Since then, a remaster of the original Nintendo 64 game was released for the Xbox 360 in 2010 to solid reviews, and a franchise reboot is apparently currently deep in development. 5. U-Draw Studio Killed THQ's The Avengers In 2010, THQ began development on a game based on Marvel's The Avengers, a co-op first-person brawler with third-person cinematic elements which would adapt the comics' iconic Secret Invasion storyline. However, the game, intended to be released in 2012, was cancelled in August 2011 when THQ closed down developers Studio Australia and Blue Tongue Entertainment. This happened because THQ had suffered catastrophic financial losses due to the release of the UDraw game tablet and companion software UDraw Studio the year prior. THQ invested heavily in U-Draw, believing that the art creation game would be the next big thing. But while it performed modestly well on the Wii, they ultimately vastly overestimated interest when bringing it to the PS3 and the Xbox 360 in 2011. In 2012, the company revealed that the U-Draw generated $100 million less revenue than projected, leaving THQ with a gigantic hole in their coffers, one that they plugged by shuttering the two aforementioned studios and consequently killing the Avengers game in the process. Quite a shame, really, because the leaked gameplay footage 4. Overwatch 2 and Diablo 4 killed StarCraft Ares In June 2019, it was revealed that Blizzard had cancelled a planned StarCraft FPS codenamed Ares that had been in active development for two years at the time. Ares would have been the first FPS in the StarCraft series and had been likened to the Battlefield series, while being produced on the Overwatch engine. Though some within the company anonymously claimed that Ares was shaping up nicely, Blizzard ultimately cancelled it to prioritise new games in two of their most lucrative IPs. As it turned out, StarCraft Ares was canned in favour of Overwatch 2, Finally released last year, and Diablo 4, which awaits release this coming June. This was a doubly crushing blow for StarCraft fans, given that Blizzard have previously cancelled a hugely anticipated third-person shooter entry into the franchise, StarCraft Ghost. Evidently, with Blizzard doing precious little with StarCraft in recent years, it's clear where their priorities lie right now. 3. Call of Duty killed Doom 4 Long before 2016's quasi-reboot of Doom was released, Doom 4 was announced back in 2008, though word went suspiciously quiet on development in the years that followed. By 2013, a damning Kotaku report suggested that Doom 4 was trapped in development hell, while claiming that the original version of the game was a heavily scripted cinematic FPS in the vein of Call of Duty, enough so that it was given the mocking name of Call of Doom internally at id Software. This version of Doom was scrapped in 2011, After the game's creative leads decided that the vision had strayed too far from the Doom blueprint and, indeed, felt too much like Call of Duty. In a 2015 interview about the debacle, executive producer Marty Stratton said, When we sat down and went through what we really wanted, to make Doom the game that we thought that people wanted, fans wanted, and that we wanted to make, well, it didn't match. Subsequently released prototype footage showed just how closely the game hewed to the Call of Duty aesthetic and gameplay style, prompting development to be restarted entirely from from scratch in 2011. Doom 4 was then retooled into what would What would become the well-received 2016 reboot, and the rest is bloody history. After years of waiting for a follow-up to Half-Life 2 Episode 2, fans finally got their wish when the VR-exclusive title Half-Life Alyx was announced in 2019 and released the very next year to universal acclaim. Yet, its development came at an undeniable cost, as during the final stretch of Alyx's production, members of development team Campo Santo, which was acquired by Valve in 2018, were called in to assist. This took Campo Santo away from their own game in the The Valley of Gods Which was unveiled with an intriguing teaser trailer in 2017, with the studio later confirming that it had been put on hold while they worked on Alyx. But with Alyx shipping in early 2020, production still hasn't resumed on In the Valley of Gods, and Campo Santo have instead been appointed to work on various other unannounced Valve projects. Needless to say, with more than five years passing since the game's original announcement and development still on ice, it's a pretty safe bet that Valve simply didn't see major value in the project and has quietly Tron Evolution killed Turok 2 2008's revival of the classic FPS Turok wasn't a great game by any means, but evidently sold decently enough that Studio Propaganda Games got the green light from publisher Disney Interactive Studios to proceed with the sequel. But Turok 2 was cancelled in 2009 before it even had been officially announced, and though reports initially pointed to the 2008 economic crisis as primarily responsible, last year YouTuber Matt McMuscles interviewed Propaganda's former art director to get to the heart of the matter. They revealed that though the prototyping had begun on Turok 2, Propaganda was pulled from developing the game and moved on to Tron Evolution, a game greenlit by Disney to coincide with the release of the 2010 movie Tron Legacy. And once that game was completed, Disney then moved Propaganda to work on another game based on one of their most popular properties, Pirates of the Caribbean Armada of the Damned. However, this game was never completed due to the critical and commercial failure of Tron Evolution, leading Disney to close Propaganda altogether in January As a result, Turok 2 died along with that studio, and the series hasn't seen a new entry since.