List of commercial failures in video and arcade games: History and Key Facts

As a hit-driven business, the great majority of the video game industry's software releases have been commercial disappointments. In the early 21st century, industry commentators made these general estimates: 10% of published games generated 90% of revenue; that around 3% of PC games and 15% of console games have global sales of more than 100,000 units per year, with even this level insufficient to make high-budget games profitable; and that about 20% of games make any profit. Within years after Steam relaxed limits on which games could be digitally distributed on its service, they reported that around 80% of games failed to reach $5000 in revenue in their first two weeks of sales.

Some of these failure events have drastically changed the video game market since its origin in the late 1970s. For example, the failure of E.T. contributed to the video game crash of 1983. Some games, though commercial failures, are well received by certain groups of gamers and are considered cult games.

The following list includes any video game software on any platform where the commercial failure has been documented as such by the manufacture or published, or affirmed through industry sales trackers (in alphabetical order).

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Text excerpted from List of commercial failures in video and arcade games by Wikipedia contributors, available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. The extract is abridged and formatting has been adjusted; the adapted text on this page is shared under the same licence. Revision history.