10 Video Game Things That Flopped in 2021

2021 was a year in gaming where a lot of things happened,  but a lot of things you might be surprised to find out didn't. Today we will be looking at  10 video game things that flopped in 2021. 

10. There was a $53 million game being internally developed by  Hangar 13 and Take-Two, which got cancelled.  Now, no information was ever released publicly about the game,  nor was it actually confirmed publicly that it was this game indeed,  but there was a game being called Volt Hangar 13 was developing.  It was kind of a Destiny type live service, third person.  We've seen plenty of this type of game in recent years.  And not a lot of them have really been regarded as good enough to continue playing.  BioWare can attest to that.  But internally, Hangar 13 staff was told that A,  the budget itself was going to be too much for them to make money off of it.  And B, there are current industry challenges.  In my opinion,  the industry challenges probably are along the lines of what I just said.  There've been a ton of games like that.  And very few of them have been successful.  Like there's Destiny, which was a big success.  And everybody's like, let's do that.  So they did.  And we got stuff like Anthem, which is wow,  a huge flop, a monumental flop.  Something that will probably be remembered as one of the biggest flops in gaming history by a successful developer.  Not to mention Marvel's Avengers.  I mean, if you can't use Marvel to sell games as a service model game,  then it's going to be a lot harder to do with original IP.  And I guess Take-Two just didn't find it to be worthwhile.  Maybe a smart move on their part because Hangar 13 is capable of really good stuff and games as a service have proven to not be that great.  

9. The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 developers quickly,  quickly went back on a decision to include NFTs in their game.  Took less than 36 hours after a massive backlash.  Remember when people had a huge backlash about DLC in games where they're going to split up games and we're going to be angry about that.  And then it happened anyway.  Well, Ubisoft, a much bigger company,  is kind of taking that route.  Everybody got mad at Ubisoft and they were like, pffft,  don't care, including NFTs anyway.  So they have created an NFT platform.  So there's probably not going to be the case that just NFTs totally died,  but at least they aren't going to be in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2.  I don't know.  That sounds like just a huge scam,  including non-fungible token crap in video games.  I just, can't imagine that working out well.  

8.  Buying a GPU at a regular price died in 2021.  This is actually related to the NFT crap because crypto has become a huge thing.  Bitcoin is worth over $40,000 per.  And everybody likes the idea of having money. Weird.  But here's the thing,  anybody who likes playing video games with like-new graphics cards or even just graphics cards that are still in production,  know that crypto mining has been kind of a bane in that area,  but it seems like GPU's pretty much are never going to be normal ever again.  Like if you remember that heist some cowboys pulled on that semi-truck where they stole all the GPU's.  It feels like that's just going to become a scarce thing from now on.  So if I sound like I don't particularly love cryptocurrency,  maybe, maybe that's why.  There are other reasons, but that's,  that's the acceptable one.  

7.  GTA Online for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, which died on December 16th, 2021.  It came along with a statement from Rockstar Games saying as we continue to move forward with updates and support for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC versions of GTA Online, the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions,  including website stat tracking,  will be officially shutting down on December 16th.  Now I get this.  In terms of architecture,  PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 are very different from PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.  But the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One,  in terms of framework,  are not that different from the new consoles,  albeit they have massively more powerful hardware in them.  So there's less of a difference between the actual programming for these generations than there is in the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 generation.  If you remember,  PlayStation 3 actually has a pretty complicated architecture, the Emotion Engine,  which I'm sure that they're not too upset to stop working on.  

6. EA pulled several Need for Speed games from sale and apparently shut down their server.  They didn't give a lot of notice either.  Now, this was a ways back on May 31st,  where they delisted Need for Speed Carbon,  Need for Speed Undercover, Need for Speed Shift,  Shift 2 Unleashed and Need for Speed the Run.  And then said they were shutting off the servers on August 31st.  That has, of course, happened at this point.  You can't buy them online and you can't play them online.  If you have them, you can play them offline, but that's it.  This also kind of bothered people on account the studio is working on a new Need for Speed,  but they delayed it by a year.  It's not coming out until 2023.  And while we certainly understand that maintaining those servers is something they maybe don't have the resources to do currently.  They could've let people purchase the games a little longer with some notice that there weren't going to be servers for them anymore,  or even just said, hey,  we're shutting the servers off for these games and let people continue to purchase them.  I don't know why they decided not to do that anymore.  It definitely makes the case for folks who are talking about archiving games for the sake of posterity.  

5. The organizers of the Penny Arcade Expo announced they were going to be cancelling PAX South.  The reason for this is A,  the ongoing pandemic and B,  a lack of growth for PAX South,  as in the show itself never really caught on in the way even other PAX conferences did.  Out of the various PAX shows,  it was a more like tabletop and indie game-driven show,  which is good for indie and tabletop game developers,  but not the kind of draw that a larger,  more mainstream-oriented show is.  And it just never really caught on the way they had hoped it would.  

4. A legendary Sega arcade in Japan closed its doors permanently after Sega's arcade division has been restructuring, you guessed it, amidst the pandemic.  Now that's not to say that all Sega arcades are done,  but we have lost two actually incredibly large figments of Japanese gaming in the form of Sega arcades that have closed.  This one was the 28-year-old Sega Ikebukuro Gigo arcade that closed on September 20th.  Now the people running the arcade said that the pandemic actually wasn't the primary reason,  but rather that a lease agreement had ended and the actual owners of the building wanted to renovate it.  And it wouldn't be compatible with having the big arcade there.  In fact,  they actually claim that business wasn't particularly affected by the pandemic.  However, I find that a little hard to believe.  I can believe that it wasn't the main reason for closing,  but things are different in terms of how many people are going out.  The arcade manager actually did a speech in front of the building when they were closing after the tune of Auld Lang Syne played over loudspeakers,  detailing the history of the arcade and saying that if they could, they would stay open forever.  

3. They also shut down efforts to create first-party  Google Stadia games, which is actually not as big of a loss  I think for gamers.  In fact, I don't think anybody really cared.  There was a lot of pomp and circumstance when Google announced Google Stadia,  but it never really lived up to the hype.  And I don't think anybody really ever played the games that they developed specifically for it.  I don't even really know if any games developed specifically for it ever came out.  I've paid so little attention to Google Stadia that this is the first time I've actually had to think about it for a while,  but it's still out there still kicking.  Maybe next year it'll be on the things that were taken from us list, or maybe it won't.  They have plenty of money to keep stuff going that they don't need.  

2. The developer behind Disintegration,  which is an actually pretty interesting first-person shooter with these strategic elements and a lot of interesting concepts that didn't quite come together,  but proved a lot of potential in terms of that type of game.  And the developers themselves.  That developer, V1 Interactive,  led by one of the Halo universes co-creators, shut down.  And honestly, that kind of sucks because like I said,  I think Disintegration wasn't quite there,  but there was a lot of potentials and it had a lot of interesting ideas.  I actually think that the Guardians of the Galaxy game owes a little bit to it.  And I think it worked out a little bit better in the case of Guardians of the Galaxy than Disintegration.  But I think some of the ideas that were present in Disintegration were more clearly developed by somebody who obviously played it.  They did the right thing at least and made the decision to shut down when they're able to still support their employees during their search for new jobs.  So at least there's that.  

1. There were three huge cancellations in terms of games.  First off,  remember how Anthem sucked and they said they were going to rework it?  Well, they decided against reworking it,  probably for the best actually, cause it did suck a lot.  Another EA cancellation was Gaia.  This MMO from a company called Motive that had been long in development.  I know less about that than I did about Anthem,  other than some pretty impressive tech demos.  And finally,  Lord of the Rings by Amazon,  which was going to be a massively multiplayer online game.  I'm guessing probably very live service oriented because this was not a year that was too kind to the live service model.  That got cancelled too,  which is pretty wild because Lord of the Rings is a massive property.  They could have made tons of money off of most likely.  And also I'm strangely completely fine with all three of these cancellations.