2024 has been a great year for gaming, and while we have been treated to some amazing games this year, we have also seen our share of disasters, from mismanaged studios to bad remakes and everything in between. For this list, we are focusing on AAA games instead of early access or indie games as they have fewer resources to work with. So, without further ado, here are the six biggest video game blunders in 2024.

6 Alone in the Dark

Another failed attempt at a remake

After two awful reboots, Alone in the Dark is back for a third time under the umbrella of industry veteran publisher THQ Nordic, being developed by Pieces Interactive. With the game being a re-imagining of the original from 1992, the graphics of the game look phenomenal compared to the source material. But where the game falls short is in its execution.

The survival horror game has very few survival mechanics present, and the horror themes are extremely timid compared to other genre juggernauts like Resident Evil and Silent Hill. While the game has a great atmosphere, and the voice acting and scenes are done very well, the combat is clunky at times, and the horror scenes lack weight.

While Alone in the Dark is considered the pioneer of the survival horror genre in video games, the remake fails to compete in the modern era of horror games. The lackluster sales of Alone in the Dark led to the closure of Pieces Interactive only three months after its initial launch.

5 Star Wars Outlaws

A great disturbance in the force, I feel

Star Wars Outlaws is by all means an absolutely beautiful game, graphically speaking. But why the game saw so few sales has more to do with Ubisoft as a company, bad marketing, and unpolished mechanics rather than the game in its entirety. The last great entry in the Star Wars universe was Jedi Fallen Order and Jedi Survivor, which had challenging Dark Souls-esque type combat, the latter of which included a blaster in its arsenal of weaponry.

That being said, a Star Wars-themed stealth shooter was not something the current fan base was looking for as the next entry to the Star Wars universe. This can be seen in another game released in 2020, Star Wars Squadrons, which focused solely on flight simulation and space combat. Both of these games encapsulate different areas of the Star Wars universe. But at the end of the day, if you're thrown into a Sci-Fi world with laser swords and space wizards, you’re most likely going to want those mechanics for your main character or at least the option to choose them.

Mechanically, the game has some flaws: enemy AI is broken, and half the time, enemies either see you through multiple walls or don't see you at all when you're directly in their line of sight. Being spotted by a single enemy will alert every enemy in the area, leading many players to save scumming through the game, leading to more frustration over how inconsistent the autosave system of the game is. You only have one weapon throughout the game; everything else is temporary, and being unable to shoot your blaster while riding the speeder is truly criminal.

But by far, the biggest problem most gamers have with Star Wars Outlaws is the same gripe they have with any modern Ubisoft game. It's the same game over and over with a different skin. This was the problem with Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora as well. Gamers want to see more innovation from Ubisoft in general. The only thing everyone seems to agree on about Star Wars Outlaws is that Nix is absolutely adorable and should be the star of the show.

4 South Park: Snow Day!

A bland and forgettable sequel

South Park: Snow Day! is a sad game to have on this list, considering how good the games' predecessors were: The Stick of Truth and The Fractured But Whole. After learning how to make a South Park game look and feel like the TV show, fans were happy to receive a new game in the same style with maybe some updated gameplay and story elements.

Unfortunately, that is not what we got in South Park: Snow Day! The previous games in the franchise were 2D turn-based RPGs (Role Playing Games) that looked and felt like you were transported into an episode of the series. South Park: Snow Day!, however, is a 3D multiplayer hack-and-slash game designed to be played with friends.

Apart from the change in art style, the game suffered heavily from a lackluster story, repetitive gameplay, and a sluggish progression system. The game's runtime was another sour note for fans, with each section of the game taking an hour to complete, which meant you could complete the game in a 6-hour run.

South Park is notorious for switching genres and narratives on the fly, which is why fans still held out hope that they would do this game justice, but apart from a few funny cutscenes here and there, this game mostly fell flat, had very tame humor and scenes in it, and just didn't encapsulate the look and feel of the series that its predecessors had built up to this point.

3 Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League

This game killed more than just the Justice League

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was developed by Rocksteady Studio, the same studio that created the Arkham games, which are fantastic single-player narrative games. So, without a doubt, the developers’ push for a live service game was already set to reduce the ratings and player turnout for this game. The first hang-up many fans had about this game was that Rocksteady decided to make it a continuation of the Arkham series storyline instead of its own universe (which angered fans even more as they played through the campaign).

After this, red flags started popping up throughout its development, with leaked storylines and internal memos showing up online. Halfway through development, the founders of the Studio up and left, signifying that there was a lot of turmoil throughout the development cycle. After the game was revealed to be a live service hero looter shooter, even the most dedicated fans started turning away.

At launch, the game was released with a Standard edition for $70 and a Deluxe edition for $100. The deluxe edition offered 72 hours of early access. Still, many players experienced a game-breaking bug that automatically marked their campaign as 100% complete, causing Rocksteady to take the game offline for several hours to perform maintenance. The publisher had also refused review copies for outlets so as not to tank the review score before the game was able to make sales.

As of writing this article, the game has had multiple 95% sales within its first year. Rocksteady has included an offline mode for the game and has announced that they will be releasing a final season for the game, season four, before pulling the plug. They will keep servers online for the time being, which is at least more than some other developers on this list have done.

2 Skull & Bones

It's not the pirate’s life for me!

Skull & Bones would have been a surefire hit when it was first announced in 2013. Hot off the heels of Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag, fans were drooling for a new IP based on pirates, naval combat, and island exploration. Unfortunately, what we eventually got was too little too late, filled with gameplay elements and mechanics that fans just weren't interested in 10 years down the line.

Skull & Bones was touted as not just a AAA (triple A) game but as a AAAA (quadruple A) game by its developer, which was met with laughter by most gamers when it was eventually released. The game has some pretty graphics, but as we've seen with other games like Sea of Thieves, fans are more interested in the gameplay and world-building over how good the game looks.

Having spent the better part of a decade in development hell, fans of the project had held out hope that the wait would be worth it in the end. However, the lack of island exploration, character combat, boarding, and the inclusion of live service elements has left a sour taste in the mouths of most of the fan base for this game.

Credit where credit is due: the naval combat in Skull & Bones is fun, and the PVE combat can be enthralling and quite difficult once you are in the end game. Still, the lack of variety in naval activities can make the game feel grindy at times, and having little to no meaningful NPC encounters relegates most pirate interactions in the game to menu screens.

1 Concord

Another headache for Sony

Arguably the biggest disappointment of 2024 was Concord, the live service first person hero shooter which came and went within only a few months. The developers behind the game, Firewalk Studios, had reportedly been developing the game for over eight years to compete with other titles in the genre like Overwatch, Apex Legends, and Valorant.

After years of development, the company was bought out by Sony Interactive in a bid for Playstation to increase its roster of live service games. While Concord did show promise in the genre, its inability to stand out and the decision to forgo the free-to-play model left few players willing to fork out the $40 necessary to jump into the game.

Having a veteran team of developers hailing from both Activision and Bungie, the game should have been able to break into the market given enough time, but with its peak player count only totaling 697 concurrent players on Steam during launch. Sony decided to pull the plug on the game after only its second week on the market and refunded the players that bought the game.

It's unclear whether Sony pulled the plug to save face or recoup its losses, but after shutting down the games’ servers, players could no longer play the game at all. Only two months later, Sony held a press conference and announced its decision to shut down Firewalk Studios for good.

Publishers are chasing trends, while studios are taking the fall

While many of these games have great graphics and unique gameplay mechanics, there is one thing that a lot of them have in common: they trade the profitability of their IP over the story they should be trying to tell. All the major publishers in the industry are trying to chase trends and monetize every aspect of a game before it's even released, and this makes studios push out lackluster games with mediocre premises. Gamers are simply voting with their wallets, and the low sales and bad reviews of the games in question show this.