In this opinion article we review the games that died of success as a result of the tremendous fame that simple games like Fall Guys and Among Us have gained. Do you want to take a look at that list of games? We start this top 5!
Flappy Bird
Do you remember the mobile game in which we were an adorable bird and we had to dodge obstacles by pressing the screen at the right moment? As simple as it is addictive, the game reached its peak in just a few months and its author removed it from digital stores due to his remorse for creating such an addictive game.
Flappy Bird was a mobile game developed in Hanoi by Vietnamese developer Nguyen Hà Đông (Dong Nguyen) and published by GEARS Studios, a small independent game developer, also based in Vietnam. The game, released on May 24, 2013, was removed from the App Store and Google Play by its creator on February 9, 2014.
This simple mechanic of flying between different pipes while the image scrolled caused the game to accumulate so many downloads that it surprised even its creator. This totally unexpected success encouraged different developers to create similar games that populated online stores.
Such was the impact of Flappy Bird on the market that the creator of the game announced its disappearance on Twitter in less than a year. Either because the benefits were too ostentatious, or because it was too addictive , the truth is that after its disappearance there has been a lot of speculation and a large number of people have tried to sell their mobile phones with the game installed at stratospheric prices. This practice reached such a point that the eBay portal had to withdraw the auction of mobile phones with the game.
Clash of Clans
I still see people who, surreptitiously, in the subway car in the morning before going to work take their mobile phone out of their pocket and hit the screen with their fingertips while listening to the sound of gold coins. I see them and smile, although I am aware that it is no longer what it was.
“Clash of Clans” came out in 2012 and quickly rose to the top of multiplayer strategy mobile games. While it is true that these types of games had been quite famous on PC , the novelty is that they began to appear in the mobile field, so people did not need to be at home to play it. For those who do not know, Clash of Clans is a game that takes place in a world where the player must build his own city using the resources obtained by attacking other players through the game's fighting feature. It is a strategic fighting title that was designed for children, but it was a hit among adults since its great advantage lies in its portability and its multiplayer mode.
One of the reasons why Clash of Clans was so successful was that after planning your strategy, you could let the game execute your guidelines , only being aware of certain times of the day to check the status of your troops and the result of the battle. strategy that you had marked. Clash of Clans was the culmination of ideas that they had previously had like Farmville on Facebook, made by the Zinga studio, which they copied very well in Hay Days.
Supercell managed to create the addictive game par excellence with Clash of Clans due to its jump to the mobile screen. It was the first of the games that managed to detach players from a PC screen and take the experience wherever they were. Also, being a multiplayer experience, it helped create a community and focus people's attention on the game for short periods of time that were prolonged by demands and solving strategies. There was always stuff going on in the game while you were going about your life. That was the key to success.
During the first five years of the game, players had spent approximately 1.9 trillion hours building defenses for their village . Despite the fact that games that copied them and that were competition came out after the fact, they have managed to remain at the top and focus on improving the title by adding few new features. In this way, they keep the most staunch players but do not win new followers, more focused on other types of games where new tools such as geolocation are used.
Overwatch
Tracer and company are no longer in every corner of the news portals. Razer hasn't released any more collaborations in a long time. The garish pink color of the hoodies is no longer seen in Game stores. It's an open secret that Overwatch has been deflating over the years.
The novelties posed by Overwatch, a multiplayer first-person shooter where we have different heroes with unique abilities, were a claim for players who wanted something more and laid the foundations for Battle Royale. It was a resounding success at the time it came out, we had teams of 6 people fighting for victory. It was conceived as a team game where each class contributed something. Despite their triumph, they have not been able to keep up over time. Players have lost interest in him for a while now and one of the reasons is clear. It has not been able to renew itself after four years of life. What at the time elevated him, right now is being the ballast.
At a time when fps was monopolized by Call of Duty, Battlefield and Counter Strike, Blizzard wanted to give the genre a twist and launched a beta that left everyone speechless. Overwatch was presented at BlizzardCon 2014 and the intention was to create a game that would become a benchmark for eSports . Divided into four classes: Attack, Defense, Tank, and Support, its heroes quickly caught on with the community of gamers who craved something different.
Overwatch was a multiplayer that did not have a campaign mode , however it had a rich universe with heroes that have their own story . Each player, with his team, created the games and created his own way of managing and handling the strategy to follow . We mixed strategy with skills, a futuristic aesthetic, charismatic characters, and a big marketing budget and threw it into the Blizzard shaker to bring out a game that garnered praise from both gamers and critics alike.
Later, when the title enjoyed some success, free to play games like Fortnite would arrive , taking the good news from Overwatch and presenting it to the public for free. We must also add that Overwatch did not die of success only, but was buried by the same players based on cheats. Blizzard 's lack of forcefulness when it comes to penalizing the so-called trolls makes them roam freely in Overwatch games, normal and competitive. This disenchanted players who wanted to get to the top with their skills alone.
The reasons for the decline are clear at this point: the game has not been able to renew itself substantially in its almost four years of life, content updates are scarce and too simple, and the competition has passed over it . And even more, all the novelties and events that have been created have a common axis: they present us with a design oriented towards the individual game, rather than the team . And that was not what Overwatch was selling us in the beginning. And that is what has led it to deflate like a balloon in the midst of a tidal wave of supply and demand.
Commandos
This is one of the best examples of a game being tied to a company. If the company disappears, the success cannot be replicated. This game, a Spanish brand, touches us very much because it catapulted our country and gave it a name within the international video game scene. What happened to this saga? Do you want to know the lights and shadows of the title?
Commandos was a pioneering game , creating almost a genre of its own as a game that has inspired other titles such as Desperados , Chicago 1930 . In 1998 the journey of this juicy saga began, from which a lot was taken advantage of, especially from its first three titles, reaching the summit in 2001 with Commandos 2: Men of Courage .
And what is it that attracted the public to Commandos? Mainly its gameplay, where action and strategy were perfectly mixed. To put it in some way, with it the "tactical strategy" style was coined or what we call the "Commandos style" in the world of video games. It was also a title that raised two great characteristics to the maximum exponent: difficulty and freedom . With its linear scenarios, it managed to make the player have a hard time in a totally free scenario to be able to develop the strategy that seemed most convenient.
As I have mentioned, it enjoyed great acclaim and unprecedented success. However, Pyro Studios began to fall apart . One of its main creators, Gonzo Suarez, left the project. And with his departure from it came the changes, also trying to adapt to the new mechanics and new genres that were coming to the market. Back in 2006, in a market with a fledgling Battlefield and Medal of Honor, Commandos Strike Force appeared, but more dressed up than usual.
With Strike Force , the saga underwent a radical change and became a first-person shooter that alternated the action between three new characters with new features. Although the idea did not look bad to stand up to the famous FPS of the time, the players did not see this change with good eyes. The public saw from the sidelines how their title was at the mercy of the market, moving away from the tactical strategy that had given them so many good times. The game fell off its pedestal and turned out to be a flop, fiercely criticized by both pundits and the general public. This was the end of a saga that today seems unrepeatable.
Kalypso Studios has brought Commandos 2 HD back to PC 19 years later and the truth is that it has been well received by critics... critics nostalgic for the good old days of video games from Spain.
Pokémon GO
If we have to talk about a game that has managed to move the masses to take to the streets to chase some monsters in augmented reality, that has been Pokemon GO. I still remember how friends who had never played videogames in their lives happily showed me their mobile screen one night in a bar while they asked me “do you know this game?”. Obviously I knew him, what surprised me is that they also knew him. We are going to know the rise and fall of the social phenomenon of Pokemon GO.
Pokemon GO has taken three concepts further that were not really exploited in the market. One of them was the interaction with the environment in which the player is . We can achieve this thanks to the Global Positioning System (GPS) that is in the mobile terminal and that is needed to locate these virtual animals.
Another concept is the achievement of a physical exercise . In other words, in order to capture the Pokemon, you had to leave the house and move around, something that took video games a step further than what we were used to on portable consoles. One of the negative consequences of this is that accidents began to happen due to not paying attention to the real world, being much more aware of the virtual world. There have been accidents with vehicles, with furniture in the center and even the occasional altercation with the police for trespassing. However, taking users out of the house to get some fresh air and play sports was tremendously well received and led to the next point: socialization.
Pokemon GO created a social component that had not been seen to date. The idea of gathering to hunt Pokémon is a reality thanks to the events that were held to get rare or legendary Pokémon. I remember how the State Bodies were alarmed by a mass concentration of people in El Retiro park because Nyantic launched one of the first generation Legendary Pokemon. Being able to gather people around the same space and get them to know each other and create bondsaround a video game was something really unheard of. Teaming up to take on a gym trainer, the possibility of player-to-player battles, and useful information about sites and locations in your own city gave it that gamification touch that made it so appealing even to casual gamers.
However, all that glittered was not gold. The businesses began to take over the Pokemon Gyms and you had to consume or enter the shop on duty to be able to use the stop. Micropayments and other types of transactions also began to be able to have special and distinctive accessories for other players. While it is true that the community began to grow exponentially with the first and second generations, so well known by young people who had played the Game Boy game back in 1993, it ceased to be successful after the third. The lesser fame of later editions was joined by complaints about how unprepared the servers wereto accommodate all user requests, especially in the passage from the first to the second season.
We must also mention the requirements of the game. Although it is true that it did not take up much space, it required a constant internet connection, at good speed, with great coverage and a huge battery demand. Few mobiles had the capacity to make such a tremendous expenditure of power without depleting the battery. And soon the most casual players got tired of hunting the same animals as always.
Pokémon was a worldwide success in the late 90s , becoming one of the most influential and recognized video games in the history of video games. For young people who played Pokémon as a child, playing Pokémon Go is a return to their childhood updated for modern times. The game has managed to bring together several generations that over the last decade and a half had played some of the versions of the game on different platforms. This game has managed to bring together different people to exercise, fight in confrontations and socialize. And achieving that is a great achievement.
Did you like this selection of games that died of success? Do you have other examples in mind? Leave your impressions in comments.
If you want to read another interesting article, check out this one about the games of the decade that have negatively affected the industry.
