Every year, we see our fair share of video game blunders. But these games take home the trophy for the most expensive video game failures of all time. These titles had disastrous releases, and their subsequent failure led to huge financial losses, studio closures, and the death of many beloved franchises.

8 Darksiders II

$50 Million

Darksiders is a hack-and-slash game where you play as one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. In the original game, Darksiders, you play as War, but in Darksiders II you play as Death. And that seems pretty fitting, considering how Darksiders II was received.

After THQ sunk nearly $50 million dollars into the game, it was considered one of the most expensive video games ever developed at the time. With the game selling only a million copies after its first year, it was condemned as one of the biggest commercial failures of the decade.

7 Shenmue

$70 Million

Shenmue was an ambitious project at the time and cost Sega over $70 million to produce. Unfortunately, they were never able to recoup their money back. While regarded as a cult classic now, at launch, the title performed poorly, and it wasn't until the sequel that the series really started to gain a fan base.

Shenmue is an open-world action-adventure game where you play as Ryo Hazuki as he avenges his father's death at Lan Di's hands. Despite its failure at launch, the game pioneered or at least popularized a lot of gameplay mechanics that we take for granted nowadays, like day/night cycles, NPCs with daily schedules, quick-time events (QTE), dynamic weather effects, and much more.

6 Too Human

$80 Million

After going through development hell for almost a decade, the action RPG, Too Human, ended up costing 80-100 million dollars and was later court-ordered to be removed from store shelves. Too Human took so long to develop that it had to be rebuilt three separate times for the PlayStation, GameCube, and Xbox 360. The studio behind the game, Silicon Knights, first started developing the game in 1999 for the PlayStation 1, but the project was abandoned.

After that, Nintendo partnered with the studio for its release on the GameCube, but development was stalled and later abandoned again. Finally, Microsoft picked up the title for the Xbox 360, and after five more years of development, the game was finally released. Unfortunately, at the same time, an ongoing lawsuit from Epic Games resulted in the court-ordered destruction of all unsold copies of the game. Leaving the studio, being unable to sell any more games, and paying nearly $4.5 million in restitution and legal fees.

5 APB: All Points Bulletin

$100 Million

APB: All Points Bulletin is another game that took way too long to develop and cost too much ever to make a real profit. APB was a massive multiplayer online (MMO) game that placed players in one of two factions, the enforcers and the criminals, fighting for control of the city of San Paro.

Announced in 2005, the game was developed by the same person who created the Grand Theft Auto and Crackdown games, so naturally, fans were excited about the new title. Unfortunately, the game left the studio floor feeling unfinished, with fans complaining that the game lacked substance and had hard-to-use controls. After its poorly received release, the game would only last a year before the servers were shut down, and the studio behind declared bankruptcy.

4 E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial

$100 Million

While many of the games on this list caused financial loss or studio closure after their failure, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial caused the entire industry to crash. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial was a movie tie-in game that was created for the Atari 2600. Due to the popularity of the movie, Atari saw an opportunity to capitalize on its success and quickly purchased the rights to the game for a staggering $22 million.

Unfortunately, the development team behind the game was only given five weeks to develop and ship the title. On release, the game received massive backlash for its horrible controls and even worse graphics. Atari, having already made five million cartridges, only managed to sell 1.5 million, and almost 700,000 were returned shortly after. The backlash from consumers was so great that the game is thought of as one of the catalysts for the 1983 crash in the video games' industry.

3 Skull & Bones

$200 million

After the meteoric success of Assassin's Creed Black Flag, fans were begging Ubisoft to release a game that revolves solely around pirates. But by the time they released Skull & Bones, nearly 12 years later, it was too little too late. Skull & Bones had been in development for so long that when it was released, the genre had already been filled by other pirate games like Sea of Thieves.

The choice to make it a live service game further alienated many of the fans, and when they announced there wouldn't be any on-foot exploration or combat, no one really wanted to play the game anymore. Being praised as a AAAA (Quadruple A) game by Ubisoft's CEO just added fuel to the fire and made it even more embarrassing when Skull & Bones eventually ended up in Davy Jones' locker.

2 Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League

$200 million

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is a live-service third-person looter shooter that puts you in the shoes of the Suicide Squad as you fight off mind-controlled members of the Justice League. But after a lackluster launch and even worse player retention, the game ended up with massive discounts and was even given away for free without enticing new players to buy the game.

There are a few reasons why this game failed, but one of the main gripes players have with the game is its live service elements. Dedicated fans hated that it was canonically part of the Arkham series. The gameplay and combat were pretty bland. The lack of diversity in missions bored players. And the boss fights were uninspiring, requiring you to shoot the Justice League with different bullets until you win.

1 Concord

$400 Million

Arguably, the biggest commercial failure in recent history is Concord. A game that had been in development for over eight years and was later bought by Sony. Concord was supposed to be a live-service hero shooter game akin to titles like Overwatch or Valorant. But after only two weeks, the game’s servers were shut down, and a month later, the studio was closed forever.

Concord’s failure can be attributed to a few things: an over-saturated market, bland and forgettable characters, bad marketing, and forgoing the free-to-play model. Hero shooter games are a dime a dozen in today's age, and all of them are free to play. There’s no doubt that if Concord had given players a chance to play the game for free, it could have ended up as one of the best free-to-play FPS games on the market.

Gone but not forgotten

While many of these games were dead on arrival, they will continue to live on in gaming history as some of the biggest video game failures of all time. Many of the games listed above ended up getting sequels or remakes that would bring the franchise back to life, but others were not so lucky.