Publishers and license holders must absolutely love throwing money down the drain because if they didn’t, this feature wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. Unequivocal cancellations rank right up there with microtransactions on the unspoken list of most reviled practices in all of gamedom, and yet, for an outsider looking in, it appears that the men in suits never learn from the lessons that previous instances of premature game death should have taught them.
For the sake of clarity, there’s a clear-cut difference between those titles that are canceled or pulled from sale for very good reason – the PC versions of Batman: Arkham Knight and Injustice 2 immediately come to mind – and those that, for all intents and purposes, look like perfectly serviceable streams of code worthy of being printed on a disc, ready to be shipped across the planet.
On the extreme end of the spectrum, however, there are those fantastical worlds that, despite brimming with potential, still kick the bucket through no fault of their own. Whether it be due to inadequate funding, poor foresight or as an unfortunate victim of collateral damage, there’s no end to the myriad of dangerous afflictions that certain promising creations aren’t immunized against and perhaps its time that steps be taken to avoid such travesties in the future.
There’s nothing to be gained from shipping a broken mess of a game, but none of these scrapped ideas could ever be described as such…
