this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2026
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What does "fail" even mean? I do have a great distaste for "AAA" titles roughly post-Skyrim, but AFAIK most AAA games succeed financially. Even Fallout76, widely regarded as a flop in terms of critical reception and player sentiment, performed reasonably well, even if not quite as well as previous Fallout titles.
There's been a growing number of AAA flops in the past 5 years. Here's an incomplete list:
I mostly liked Saint's Row, I didn't like the gang based on antifa (It just screamed of "Hurr durr, kids these days want everything handed to them!11") and why is Freckle Bitch's now called FB's? That's just fucking weird.
But other than that I enjoyed it
I really don't want to consider Outlaws a flop even though i know the studios do. I played it (public library copy) a year after release and it was plenty fun. I'd probably pay $15 for it.
Tbh, that's probably most people's reaction to it on launch, instead of full price. Hence why it lost money
Honestly watching a let's play of Gollum was the most hilarious thing I've seen in a long time. Like 10 hours of laughs. I'm not even sure if it counts as bad anymore if you categorise it as a comedy game
Pains me to see Marathon on this list. The game is so good in so many ways. Gun play, world building, narrative, characters. The quality is truly there. Their problem was that they made the wrong genre. Why they would spend so much time and money on an extraction shooter is beyond me.
Because extraction shooters make money.
Well, some extraction shooters.
Ok, actually a very tiny fraction of extraction shooters make money.
But we can totally tempt people away from it, and make all that money for ourselves!
A small number make a lot of money, so gambling addicted CEOs want to try their hand at it
there have been a pretty large number of live service disasters in recent memory. from CA's Hyenas being so terrible that it got shelved after a playtest, to Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (blech) crashing out within a year, to Concord getting pulled off the Sony store within months, to most recently Highguard lasting a mere 45 days... and that's just what I can remember off the top of my head. Every single one of those games was a flop, with Concord famously losing Sony millions of dollars.
all this amidst a sea of studio layoffs happening year over year, I think it's fair to say that the western AAA scene is currently floundering.
I don't think it's fair to lump live service games in with all AAA games, that's its own very specific kind of failure and a lot easier to explain with greed and shit management at the helm.
Look at other recent AAA failures and it's a very different story, though still ultimately failure.
And to be fair to 76, it genuinely is a good MMO-style game now, IMO. It'll never be at the level of FNV/FO4/Skyrim as far as community sentiment goes, since you can't mod the shit out of it, but compared to launch when I finally went back to it last year, I put enough time into it again to feel like I got my money's worth.
I think the fundamental issue is that people who like FO4 or Skyrim typically don't want to play an MMORPG in the first place. But maybe I'm extrapolating too much from myself.
no, that's exactly it: the entire franchise is built on being fundamentally a single player game and highly customizable.
players, reasonably, expect that from the series.
also, God Emperor Todd^TM^ promised you would never have to see another player if you didn't want to...which - and you will never guess this - was a complete and utter lie.
so on top of going against the established series formula players were also lied to about the game being playable without the MMO aspect.
the FO76 launch really was a legendary shitshow...