Top 10 Worst Video Game Launches

Hello Games' August 2016 launch became synonymous with broken promises after Sean Murray's ambitious pre-release interviews. The game shipped without multiplayer, base building, or most advertised features, though its redemption arc is now legendary. Compared to Cyberpunk 2077's launch, No Man's Sky had a smaller player base but a bigger trust gap—only 10% of pre-orders stuck around after month one, versus the industry average of 40%.

Bethesda's November 2018 online survival game launched with game-breaking bugs, a barren world devoid of NPCs, and a canvas bag controversy that led to an FTC investigation—triggering 150% more support tickets than Anthem's launch month despite lower player counts. The Nylon Bag scandal alone became an industry cautionary tale, with 72% of customer reviews in the first week being negative.

BioWare's February 2019 looter-shooter launched with a broken loot system, loading screens between loading screens, and PS4 crashes that bricked consoles—issues that, per user polls, occurred 60% more frequently than Fallout 76's most common bugs at launch. EA officially killed the promised Anthem 2.0 overhaul in February 2021, leaving a development budget over $100 million wasted.

Blizzard's June 2022 mobile entry was technically functional but morally bankrupt. Analysis revealed it could cost over $100,000 to fully gear a character, a 50% higher ceiling than the average mobile pay-to-win game, earning it the lowest Metacritic user score of 0.2 and bans in Belgium and the Netherlands.

Maxis' March 2013 reboot required an always-online connection for a single-player game, and the servers immediately collapsed under demand—a problem that outperforms #9 on this list for day-one failures. Cities were limited to plots that were 80% smaller than those in SimCity 4, and the traffic AI was fundamentally broken.

DICE's November 2021 launch stripped out staple features like a server browser, voice chat, and a traditional scoreboard. The 128-player matches ran terribly, specialists replaced classes, and the game lost 90% of its Steam players within a month—a faster decline than the average triple-A title sees in six months.

343 Industries' November 2014 compilation promised seamless matchmaking across four Halo games, but it was slower to fix than Halo: The Master Chief Collection's own later updates. Instead, multiplayer was essentially nonfunctional for months, with players waiting upwards of 30 minutes to find broken matches—a wait time 10 times longer than the industry standard for online shooters.

2K's October 2019 wrestling game launched with character models that looked like melting wax figures, gameplay glitches that sent wrestlers flying into the stratosphere, and a bug that crashed the game every time the real-world date hit January 1, 2020. Compared to #2 on this list, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, its 45% user score on Metacritic actually outperforms WWE 2K20's 33%, making it the worst-rated wrestling game on the platform.

Atari's December 1982 tie-in was developed in just five weeks, which is 75% faster than the average 20-week development cycle for a typical action game of that era. The resulting game was so incomprehensible and unsellable that millions of cartridges were buried in a New Mexico landfill, symbolizing the 1983 video game crash. Its 3.5 million unsold units, buried 30 feet deep, exceeded the total production run of many contemporary hits like Pac-Man.