Poor planning, lousy scheduling, bad marketing, and just bad luck. Which games sank into oblivion despite being really good?

Titanfall 2 was sent out to die by EA. Worse, it was sent out to die as a sacrifice to EA’s ambition to dethrone the Call of Duty franchise by hammering it with rivals, and what ended up happening was that nothing happened to CoD, Battlefield (also published by EA) hoovered up everything else and Titanfall 2 was left with the scraps. Titanfall 2 was dead almost as soon as the published scheduled it between their hated CoD rival and their own Battlefield series.

Video games as an industry aren’t what I would call a rational. I’m trying to find an example here that isn’t as gruesome as referring to Kronos eating his own children or as obscure as the Symplegades trying their best to grind anything passing between them into flinders, but they both kind of work — companies routinely make decisions that end up destroying a game before it really gets rolling. Sometimes games survive because of this — it took Peter Molyneux years of terrible public statements to finally almost kill the Fable series because the core idea was good enough to survive him, and Diablo survived the Real Money Auction House as well as announcing a mobile game instead of the next game in the series — but often, we get a Kingdoms of Amalur put up against not only Skyrim, but also their studio leadership’s utter incompetence and money bleeding ways.

Whether it’s a Heroes of the Storm that simply can’t win the uphill battle against giants like DOTA 2 or League of Legends, an Immortals of Aveum simply drowned out in a year of major releases, or Immortals Fenyx Rising doomed  by comparisons with a game it looks like and a name inflicted on it by a soda company lawsuit, sometimes good or even great games don’t get the attention they deserve.

Also, maybe don’t name your game anything with the word immortals in the title.

So what do you think? What games did you love that maybe didn’t get the attention they deserved? Why not? Was it a bad release date? Was it constantly going up against games like Breath of the Wild or Elden Ring and yes, I’m talking about the Horizon series here. Which great games deserved better?