Have you played a game that failed to launch or quickly un-launched?

[Lauren Morton]

Hey PC gamers and welcome back to the chat log! This week Mollie and I called up Wes Fenlon to talk about the Concord effect. So we've all seen the news recently about how Concord just sort of failed to leave the launch pad. It barely lasted more than a week with poor player numbers and then it promptly got pulled from storefronts and refunded to players. This definitely isn't the first game that tripped at the starting line though. In fact, we're starting to see it happen more often. Wes actually collected some more examples of 5 times games failed to launch and what happened next.

Have you ever played a game that failed to launch or quickly un-launched?​

In this episode we talked about some other notable examples where this happened like The Day Before's very explosive failure right on launch day resulting in servers shutting down about a month later. What about Crucible? I literally forgot about Crucible. Most importantly than just "were you there to see it?" have you liked a game that crashed a burned? Did you feel like it deserved to try finding a niche audience? Or was it better off forgotten?

 

[Zloth]

Anarchy Online shut down very soon after launch - like a day or so. Weeks passed with nothing. I figured my $40 was gone for good.

Suddenly, it was back. It was still extremely buggy and running all the way to your mission and back wasted a LOT of time, but it was playable. I stuck with it for a few months before heading over to Dark Age of Camelot.

I've seen other extremely bad launches (Sword of the Stars 2, X: Rebirth, Underworld Ascendant) but they all kept going, they weren't un-launched.

 

[Colif]

Not yet.

Wouldn't most of the NFT games announced in the last 4 years be on this list? Almost easier to list the ones that did release.

Hopefully Star Citizen actually releases.
Duke Nukem Forever probably shouldn't have... 14 years in development... should have cut that chord years before.