Poor marketing? Or bad design? A rise in failed games

Graphic of hornet killing AAA games (Logan Budlong / The Puma Prensa)

By Logan Budlong, staff writer

Games have long been a part of entertainment and culture. Each release marks improvement in game design, and marketing strategy for appealing to the masses. However along with these advancements comes companies looking to make a quick buck by piggybacking on already popular ideas.

These games are being made more regularly now as companies continue to fail to learn from the mistakes of themselves and others. Trying unsuccessfully to push their ideas of a “good” game onto the consumer.

Highguard is the most recent of these failures, a game trying to reimagine the hero shooter genre which had had a reemergence after the success of Marvel Rivals. However they failed to learn from the mistakes of Playstations Concord and are already planning to shut down the games servers only a few months after launching.

Graph of player count for Highgaurd on release (Logan Budlong / The Puma Prensa)

Midseye 3 was another game that got the dead on arrival treatment although for a different reason than high guard. While high guard suffered from bland and uninspired gameplay, Mindseye 3 was completely unplayable due to the immense amount of bugs and mistakes throughout the game.

The development team of Mindseye 3  has worked to fix many of these bugs and as of now the story is playable at the very least, however the quality is still not where it was promised and by this point the game is unlikely to ever recover from its launch failures.

Games fail in the market for various reasons, whether it be infrequent updates for live service games, low quality storytelling, gameplay, or art. Many factors can lead games to fail quickly or slowly. 

In recent years however there is a more concrete cause for the failure of games and the fault lies in the game studios connections with, and understanding of their audience. This is reflected in poor timing and low quality of many marketing attempts.

A good example of this would be how Highguard was announced at the end of the Game Awards in December. A spot normally reserved for returning or continuing franchises that already have a large playerbase. This disappointed most people looking forward to the announcements lowering its chances for success.

Additionally this came right after the success of Marvel Rivals, and most gamers were feeling burnt out from the hero shooter genre in general and didn't want or need a new game in the same style.

Larger franchises are starting to die off now as well, with the game Destiny 2 seeing a steep decline in players after Marathons release, this already coming off a lack of satisfaction from fans over the recent major content updates being underwhelming.

And other companies are slacking off in the quality of their games with Black Ops 7 being a great example of how studios can't just push out new games frequently and expect them to sell, especially when the games have been decreasing in quality like the Call of Duty franchise.

The final large reason that can be attributed to the failure of many games as of late is the steep increase in demand for independently published projects (indie games). With games like Hollow Knight Silksong by Team Cherry crashing multiple digital storefronts on release.

Games like Peak from Landfall Entertainment and Aggrocrab also fit into this category, which won't break any sales records but still draws in thousands of players due to its quality and frequent updates despite only being ten dollars.

Nowadays gamers feel they can get the same, or even greater quality games. For significantly less from indie studios, pulling the market away from Triple A releases and towards passion projects.

All of these factors have contributed in some way to the decline in playercounts among newer and some older games that normally you could expect a large playercount from.