Games That Released At Wrong/Bad Times

[Moonface]

With the imminent launch of Elden Ring, the internet is awash with people noting that once again the launch of a Horizon game has been quickly followed up and overshadowed by another bigger release that also happens to be hailed as one of the best games of all time. If you need a reminder, the first Horizon game released close to Breath of the Wild and was consistently compared to it due to both being open world games, and it won't surprise me if Forbidden West's open world starts to be compared to Elden Ring's once people get their hands on it to compare the two. Jokes have also been made that when the third Horizon game comes out another huge release is going to follow it soon after and that the series just can't catch a break. Of course that isn't to say Horizon is being hurt badly by these other games launching so close to it, but it doesn't change the fact that the series has suffered from unfortunate timing with every release so far.

Aside from that, there's also the well-known risk of launching a game in the same window as a Call of Duty title, with signs in the past of publishers moving their games back to avoid their sales being eaten by that franchise. A few have opted not to and done fine, such as Uncharted 3, but I'm sure there are some games that didn't move their release and got hurt by CoD. I tried looking for any that were but it turns out to be a bigger endeavor than I expected and wish to undertake right now.

Another factor could also just be the hardware or the times. Maybe a game came out before there was hardware that could allow the developers to achieve their vision properly. Or maybe a cultural event happened, such as was the case with Motorstorm Apocalypse which was delayed in the wake of the Japan earthquakes, and when it did finally release it sold poorly because all the marketing budget had gone into advertising the game for its original launch, and it released with very little fanfare and I didn't even know it had come out until months after the fact because of it.

So what's a game that you think released at the wrong time or a bad time? Or maybe you know of an opposite example where a game actually performed better than expected because its launch coincided with something that boosted its sales?

[Dragon Lord]

Atelier Sophie 2.

Not only is it releasing around Elden Ring, causing it to go mostly ignored, but it has the extreme unfortune of releasing on the same exact day -- February 25th.

RIP

[Moonface]

I'm wondering how noticeable that games release would've been otherwise @Dragon Lord since I hadn't even heard about it anywhere to the point I didn't even know it was coming out today.

[Dragon Lord]

While not the biggest release out there, the Atelier series did gain quite a bit of traction in recent years with the release of the Atelier Ryza games. I don't think it'll kill Sophie's numbers compared to what it would have sold anyways, but I imagine there's going to be a good chunk of people who would have bought and played Sophie 2 on release if not for Elden Ring.

Overall it should not doom Sophie 2, but I think KT will see a bit of a later bloom for the game compared to normal. I myself would have probably played Sophie 2 the moment I got it if not for Elden Ring releasing at the same time (though I still bought the game because I wanted the Limited Edition, of course).

[Moonface]

Overall it should not doom Sophie 2, but I think KT will see a bit of a later bloom for the game compared to normal. I myself would have probably played Sophie 2 the moment I got it if not for Elden Ring releasing at the same time (though I still bought the game because I wanted the Limited Edition, of course).

I think the only unfortunate thing that could come from a late bloom is if people who held off on it due to Elden Ring (or something else that came out close to it like Horizon) end up waiting to pick it up on a sale instead of full price like they may have done because they might not get around to the game until a point where it feels like it could start going on sale. I've done that when a lot of games have come out close together and by the time I get around to picking up one of the ones I didn't I've started waiting on it because I knew a sale was likely to come about since the game had been out for a little bit or it was nearing the time where sales can happen on Steam or in stores, i.e. Black Friday.

[Nightingale]

Strife (1996) coming out right in-between of Duke Nukem 3D and Quake killed it and all the momentum it could have built.

Dominion (Ion Storm's first game) being released amongst other heavy-hitting titles was a crass mistake, too.

[Moonface]

Dominion (Ion Storm's first game) being released amongst other heavy-hitting titles was a crass mistake, too.

Judging by the games history (most notably going over budget by a large sum) and reception on Wikipedia it doesn't sound like it would have done well no matter when it released.

One game I forgot about until now that might be one of the most notably poorly timed releases ever is Battleborn. This quote from an article about the subject of this thread by What Culture (which is what reminded me of this game) sums it up pretty well:

It released in May 2016, the same month as Overwatch. The end.

Two games that were the same concept, but Overwatch just did everything significantly better and killed any chance of Battleborn doing well. It was removed from sale only three years later, and the servers closed down entirely in January 2021. Gearbox tried a few things to encourage players to come back, such as trying to turn the game free-to-play and adjust pricing, but it didn't matter. I think the only way the game could've done well would be to have released before Overwatch by a significant amount of time, because anything close to it or after it would just end up with a similar result I think.

[Maniakkid25]

Yeah, I was thinking of mentioning Battleborn, but just decided it was beating a dead horse. It's a tragedy, and I seriously consider it the Armored Warfare to Overwatch's World of Tanks (well, back when Obsidian were the devs behind Armored Warfare, that is...): two games that are very similar at surface level, but both have their own spins on the same content that is fun to play.

[Moonface]

Yeah, I was thinking of mentioning Battleborn, but just decided it was beating a dead horse. It's a tragedy, and I seriously consider it the Armored Warfare to Overwatch's World of Tanks (well, back when Obsidian were the devs behind Armored Warfare, that is...): two games that are very similar at surface level, but both have their own spins on the same content that is fun to play.

Apparently Titanfall 2 was another game that came out at a bad time, with other bigger hitters in the same genre releasing close to it and causing it to be overlooked. Luckily sales did pick up for it but probably too late since the IP has been abandoned since and Respawn didn't even bother to fix the games DDoS issues after announcing they would a year ago as of today.

Speaking of games that sold poor at first but did better later due to their release date, Okami is another. Came out at the end of the PS2's life cycle and didn't have a lot of marketing behind it, which right on the cusp of the new generation of consoles coming out and having a ton of marketing behind them and their games, caused it to fall under the radar for a lot of people. Not entirely based on bad timing due to the marketing, but maybe it wouldn't have done as badly if there wasn't so much other stuff being marketed heavily around it.

[ShiraNoMai]

Okami's team, Clover Studio, got REALLY fucked over by Capcom, when even though the game, despite being a critical success, failed to meet Capcom's sales expectations so they were like "alright let's shove this team's assets elsewhere, clearly new IP was a bad idea." When the game was later re-released/remastered, Capcom had the gall to even exclude the studio from the credits.

At least it resulted in PlatinumGames' creation.

Another great game that released at a horrible time, as I see your avatar and signature combo, is precisely that: A Hat In Time. Released just weeks before the highly anticipated and then well-revered Super Mario Odyssey, this platformer, which had been Kickstarted and in the making for quite some time (I missed the backing window by like a month!), had gotten completely abandoned from the limelight. It's a sleeper hit in terms of indie platformers, and really deserves more recognition than it got.

[Moonface]

So I was curious if Dragon's Dogma performed badly outside of Japan when it initially launched due to any bad timing, and from what I can find online it looks like it might have been a mixture of that and bad marketing. Skyrim and Dark Souls had released six months prior, and were dominating the market that DD was placing itself into as a new IP by a company who seemingly had never done anything similar to it beforehand. Not only did it have to compete with those two powerhouses, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning came out a month prior to DD and Mass Effect 3 released in the same week as DD, so having all these games to contend with was already probably a big task and the poor marketing just exacerbated the struggles. It's probably why it did well in Japan, since marketing was better over there and Dark Souls is probably the only game I mentioned in this post that had any appeal to that region which means less big hitters to compete with for attention.

I saw a few other takes on why it may have done badly too, but none of them seem to have been as big of a reason as the competition and lack of attempt by Capcom to make the game stand out against all of it. The situation reminds me a little of the Horizon series always having the misfortune of releasing an entry right around the same time as another big hitter that takes the spotlight from it, but fortunately Horizon always has the marketing to keep the sales up out of the gate better than DD did.

[Kyng]

So I was curious if Dragon's Dogma performed badly outside of Japan when it initially launched due to any bad timing, and from what I can find online it looks like it might have been a mixture of that and bad marketing. Skyrim and Dark Souls had released six months prior, and were dominating the market that DD was placing itself into as a new IP by a company who seemingly had never done anything similar to it beforehand. Not only did it have to compete with those two powerhouses, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning came out a month prior to DD and Mass Effect 3 released in the same week as DD, so having all these games to contend with was already probably a big task and the poor marketing just exacerbated the struggles. It's probably why it did well in Japan, since marketing was better over there and Dark Souls is probably the only game I mentioned in this post that had any appeal to that region which means less big hitters to compete with for attention.

I saw a few other takes on why it may have done badly too, but none of them seem to have been as big of a reason as the competition and lack of attempt by Capcom to make the game stand out against all of it. The situation reminds me a little of the Horizon series always having the misfortune of releasing an entry right around the same time as another big hitter that takes the spotlight from it, but fortunately Horizon always has the marketing to keep the sales up out of the gate better than DD did.

Yeah, good point. When I first heard of Dragon's Dogma, I thought "Skyrim knock-off", and skipped it. (That probably wasn't a fair assessment on my part, but it was the message I got from the marketing)

I still haven't tried Dragon's Dogma to this day, although I feel like I should at least give it a go, especially now that the sequel's been announced!

[Dragon Lord]

So I was curious if Dragon's Dogma performed badly outside of Japan when it initially launched due to any bad timing, and from what I can find online it looks like it might have been a mixture of that and bad marketing. Skyrim and Dark Souls had released six months prior, and were dominating the market that DD was placing itself into as a new IP by a company who seemingly had never done anything similar to it beforehand. Not only did it have to compete with those two powerhouses, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning came out a month prior to DD and Mass Effect 3 released in the same week as DD, so having all these games to contend with was already probably a big task and the poor marketing just exacerbated the struggles. It's probably why it did well in Japan, since marketing was better over there and Dark Souls is probably the only game I mentioned in this post that had any appeal to that region which means less big hitters to compete with for attention.

I saw a few other takes on why it may have done badly too, but none of them seem to have been as big of a reason as the competition and lack of attempt by Capcom to make the game stand out against all of it. The situation reminds me a little of the Horizon series always having the misfortune of releasing an entry right around the same time as another big hitter that takes the spotlight from it, but fortunately Horizon always has the marketing to keep the sales up out of the gate better than DD did.

Which is unfortunate because Dragon's Dogma puts Skyrim to shame. I played Skyrim a LOT when it came out, and Dark Souls started to take me away from it, but the game that really finally broke me out of Skyrim was Dragon's Dogma. DD's combat is just top-notch.

[Mr EliteL]

I wouldn't say DD did badly, although if Japan had other games at the time then it would have done. Definitely didn't reach the potential it could've had because of other games' releases unfortunately, but that made the game a gem to me, especially how quickly I came to love DD. I thought other people would just look at it as a rip-off or lesser Skyrim. I myself wasn't even interested in Skyrim mainly because it was a bigger franchise and wanted to give DD a chance after I saw it at an Expo way back in, '11 or '12, can't remember which one it was now.

[Moonface]

Which is unfortunate because Dragon's Dogma puts Skyrim to shame. I played Skyrim a LOT when it came out, and Dark Souls started to take me away from it, but the game that really finally broke me out of Skyrim was Dragon's Dogma. DD's combat is just top-notch.

Which Souls game would you say the combat of DD feels closest to, or would you instead say that DD does it better than those games do overall?