4 Iconic Games that Lost Their Popularity

The video games industry is on fire these last decades. That gave birth to a fierce competition between games editors, trying to keep up with the pace and struggling to conserve their fanbase.

Unfortunately, some iconic games couldn’t match the challenge and were left behind the rivalry.

This list will enumerate four games that lost their popularity in the last years. As a disclaimer, I repeat that I’m saying that these games just lost their popularity. I DO NOT say that they are dead or not fun anymore, it’s just that they lost the shine they had when they were first released.

4 / Tom Clancy’s The Division

The Division is an online action game published by Ubisoft on March 2016. It’s available on PC, PS4 and Xbox One.

The game is set on an epidemic world, New York City to be precise, where a disease called “Green Poison” causes a crisis. As a result, Manhatten is placed under quarantine where chaos prevails. The mission is to establish order by looking into the virus’s source.

The game started big. It was ranked #4 on steam the month of its release. I compared its progress throughout the years and found that in November 2016 it was ranked #40. A year after, it went down to #103 and last November it ranked #121. Looking at the numbers, it’s no secret that the game is dying and that its actual version is having a hard time staying up the surface.

A sequel to the game is scheduled for March 2019, it will be the game’s hope to resurrect, especially that the trend lately is the surviving cooperative game types.

3/ Need for speed

Back in the days, we used to talk about a new Need For Speed game for a long time, then we keep playing it for an even longer period. Now, it just doesn’t seem like a big deal anymore.

The last NFS game is “Need for Speed Payback”, published by Electronic Arts on November 2017.

Like its prequels, NFS Payback is a racing game centering around illicit action-driving. You roam around in an open-world map, customizing your vehicle and buying new ones.

In my opinion, each new release doesn’t offer much innovation. It makes you feel like they publish a new game just to cash in, trying to sell some tiny upgrades as major. The gameplay is always the same and the storyline doesn’t have much to offer. For me, it’s just the hype of underground races that keeps me fascinated.

Even the graphics are not jaw-dropping since the other new games offer much better visual experience.

2/ Street Fighter

The almighty franchise is having a very hard time keeping up with the game industry!

Street Fighter, commonly abbreviated to SF, is a fighting video game developed and published by Capcom. The first game was launched in 1987, followed by many other releases, spin-offs, and cross-overs until we arrived to the last title of the game “Street Fighter V” which was released in 2016 on PC and PS4.

According to SteamChart, on its release month, Street Fighter V counted an average of 5,895.9 players. Now, less than 2 years after that, there are only 1,262.9 left!

To be honest, I think that all fighting games are losing it right now. Maybe they’re not ultra fit to the online gaming style, but rather the family party gaming ones like it is with the Nintendo franchises.

1/ Destiny

Destiny is an online multiplayer FPS, developed by Bungie and published by Activision. The last game of the franchise is “Destiny 2” and was released in September 2017.

The first Destiny game was console-only, available on PS3, PS4, XBOX 360 and Xbox One. But the second one is also playable on PC (and removed the old gen consoles).

When the game first launched in 2014, it was a really huge hit! We had fun playing it, harvesting the legendary weapons and going on raids with friends. But the problem, in my opinion, was that you quickly hit the limits. Once you complete leveling up (which is really fast to achieve), you start aiming for the legendary guns and weapons. When you do it for a while, you start feeling bored. Same raids, same events, it gets annoying.

That’s when Bungie announced a Destiny 2. We got excited thinking that it’ll be something new and really different from the first game. But the hype went down REALLY quickly.

A chart from a post on Reddit shows how players count dropped down drastically from around 1.3 million at launch on September 2017 to just over 321,000 at the end of the same year, which is a drop of around 75.37 percent in barely three months!

Conclusion

All the games I mentioned are really amazing, and I, personally, have a great time playing them. The fact that they’re on this list doesn’t mean that they’re unplayable, it’s just to say that they use to be on every top list out there and it’s no longer the case.

I hope to see them rise from their ashes, bring their best on and keep us enjoyed as they did throughout the past years.