Video Games That Were A Total Waste Of Money

As much as we joke about bad games, revel in memes of terrible glitches, and forever riff on silly, failed stories, we should keep in mind: bad games are downright dangerous. Not only do they mar the reputations of industry professionals and studios, but they also manage to suck up a lot of money. In some ways, failures can be more costly than hits. And that's just talking about the studios throwing cash at a poorly conceived concept. There are some infamous instances of players being outright robbed by games that never even saw the light of day.

This goes far beyond just a badly spent $60 on a game gone wrong. This list hashes out and rightfully chastises games that should have been required to pay their players back for their wasted time and money, because a lot of time and money went into hoping in vain that they'd actually be good. From crashed Kickstarters to AAA lemons, these games were outright wastes of money.

Don't be surprised: we couldn't talk about wasting money without acknowledging the crashed hype train of No Man's Sky. For what it's worth, the game seems to have finally hit its stride and now enjoys a much less bitter playerbase. Back in 2014 when we first heard the words "procedurally generated planets," we couldn't help but have high expectations for this love letter to peaceful space exploration that Hello Games appeared to be artfully penning. However, upon release, it quickly became apparent that No Man's Sky wasn't the next big thing in gaming. It was the next big flop. Many players experienced game-breaking bugs and a general feeling that this wasn't the game they thought it was — you can't even ride the big alien animals!

The controversy around No Man's Sky led to uproar, death threats, and outrage over refund policies. People wanted their $60 back. It's easy enough to refund games on Steam, but other platforms like PlayStation ... not so much. In the fallout, players were treated to the nasty surprise that you can refund a game up to 14 days after purchase, provided you haven't started downloading it. If you have, then you are only eligible for a refund if the content is somehow faulty. While not everyone had the displeasure of finding their game glitchy, many were simply dissatisfied and found that if they had bought the game through the PlayStation Store, they had essentially wasted their money and weren't going to get it back.

You know what's cool? Swinging a lightsaber around as Darth Vader himself. You know what's not cool? Having to pay a bunch of money for the sliver of a chance to do it. When you blow 60 bucks on a Star Wars game, it justifiably comes with the expectation that you'll get to do cool Star Wars things: play as character from the movies, fly ships from the movies, and not have to pay extra to do so. Star Wars: Battlefront 2 quickly became face of the loot box controversy that continues to plague the games industry.

In order to play the game as fans imagined it, gamers would have to spend more money, real-life money, on loot boxes which contain random benefits and items. The gambling nature of this mechanic meant that even as players spend gobs of cash, they still might not get what they wanted, like the ability to play as Darth Vader. But hey, EA said, you could still unlock benefits the good old-fashioned way through endless grinding. Days and days of grinding. Battlefront 2 was clearly rigged in a way that favored players who paid for the content. No one likes pay-to-win games, and they especially don't like them when they've already paid the AAA price. Battlefront 2 offered the chance for players to fruitlessly waste money, so much so that even those who didn't revolted and wanted the initial $60 they had spent back.

Neal Stephenson, famed for sci-fi hits like Snow Crash, looked at video games and decided it was time for a revolution. A self-described "swordsmanship geek," he saw that swordfighting in video games was unrealistic, and more importantly, unfun. Considering the bright future of gaming gear, VR, and haptic feedback, he wanted to make an all new, ultra realistic experience: Clang.

Clang promised high-precision motion controls to support moves from real sword arts: "Different stances, pommel strikes, grappling, feints, and parries." The project exceeded its $500,000 goal, but ran into a familiar Kickstarter problem: there wasn't enough money. And even with the prototype they had, the game wasn't meeting expectations. An update said, "The prototype was technically innovative, but it wasn't very fun to play." Apparently, historically accurate swordfighting just isn't as cool as it sounds. Fans of swordsmanship would never get to see the game they paid a minimum of $25 for. According to Stephenson, a few dozen people received refunds and welcomed backers to ask for them, but shut the door on refunds three months later. The comments section was surprisingly forgiving, save for a few scuffles and one vague threat of a class action lawsuit.

Do we really have to state the obvious? Video game movies are bad. Video games based on movies are usually even worse. No matter how exciting, amazing, incredible the film, the games based upon them are meh at best; that includes blockbuster adventures like Pirates of the Caribbean, James Cameron's Avatar, and Star Trek. These games are garage sale fodder, plain and simple.

Star Trek: The Game is just one example of a bad movie video game. Kirk and Spock might be voiced by Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto, but they certainly don't move like them. They're stiff, uncanny imitations who really don't do anything all that interesting. The pace is glacial, hampered by dumb minigames, frustrating mechanics, and broken AI. Star Trek: The Game felt like a slapped-together side project that was more than eclipsed by the film, and thank goodness for that.

Chances are, the only way that you're familiar with this game is through either videos riffing on it or compilations of the game-breaking, mind-bending glitches. Not really a true Sonic game, Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric is based on the Cartoon Network animated show, wherein Sonic, Knuckles, Tails, and Amy are teamed up. Though each character has their own powers and abilities, the game was bogged down with bugs, a bad story, and surprisingly slow-moving characters.

But hey, Sonic has had a history with bad games, like 2006's infamous iteration, and always managed to survive. It turns out, however, that Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric and its 3DS sister Shattered Crystal were such big wastes of money that Sega questioned the viability of their own mascot. That's right: Sonic Boom almost killed the Blue Blur himself.

There's nothing wrong with getting caught up in the hype when it comes to a new addition to your favorite franchise. There's nothing wrong with wanting more than just a physical copy of the game. Merch is cool, merch is great, but Fallout 76 merch was not cool or great: it was cheaply made but somehow cost $200. Fallout 76 was a disappointing flop, and while most one-time fans were out around $60 in pre-orders, others had sprung for the $200 Power Armor edition of Fallout 76.

This edition included the lackluster game, of course, but what caused so much contention was the bag. In the advertised image of the Power Armor edition, a military-style canvas bag is featured. What fans received instead was what one purchaser called a "ghetto a** nylon trash bag." What rankled more was the knowledge that Bethesda knew full well that the bag wasn't canvas, and didn't have any intentions initially of rectifying this bait and switch. After all the hullabaloo, however, they decided to graciously grant upset players with 500 Atoms for their $200 trouble.