Great Games That Sold Poorly (at Least Initially)
It's no news that artistic success doesn't have to go hand in hand with commercial one. However, sometimes it's hard to believe that the titles which are successful and popular to this day were complete commercial flops in their first years.
Table of Contents
- Great Games That Sold Poorly (at Least Initially)
- Shenmue and Shenmue 2
- Planescape: Torment
- Okami
- Psychonauts
- System Shock 2
- Quake Champions
- The Evil Within 2
- Original War
- Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth
- Bulletstorm
- Tales from the Borderlands
- Grim Fandango
Bulletstorm
- Release date: 2011
- Genre: shooter
- Greatest advantages: Humor, original world, combat mechanics
The Polish co-op shooter by the authors of once extremely popular Painkiller simply had no weaknesses. Science fiction fans got a juicy story about a planet overrun by bloodthirsty plants. FPS fans have perfectly balanced combat and game modes offering lots of fun with friends. And those who liked the vast territory to explore got a rich living world that looks decent even today.
So why wasn't the game commercially successful? One of the factors might have been the fact that it got censored in Germany, and was released in February 2011. Still a few years before the Steam era, games created by smaller studios had much smaller chances to break through to the mainstream. Although the production received almost exclusively high scores – from those magazines that even noticed Bulletstorm– but most of the industry paid no attention to it at all.
People Can Fly, the creators of this vibrant shooter, didn't give up, however, returning to this universe many years later. And this time around, they managed to generate considerable profits in relation to the costs incurred. This makes the release of a sequel quite possible. It would be quite a story! We hope we'll be able to write an article about it one day.
