In the past decade, the gaming world has seen incredible highs and some truly abysmal lows. This article shines a light on the latter, the most notorious video game flops from 2015 to 2025. These are the titles that earned universal groans, facepalms, or outright laughter for just how bad they were. Before jumping into the hall of shame, let’s lay out the criteria for what makes a game one of the “worst of the decade.”
10 min read • Jan 31, 2026
When picking the worst games of 2015–2025, we focused on titles that strongly signaled their awfulness across multiple areas:
With those criteria in mind, let’s count down (in chronological order) the worst video games of 2015–2025. Each of these games serves as an example of what not to do and in some cases, they’re downright amusing in their failure.
The Tony Hawk franchise was once the king of skateboarding games – until Pro Skater 5 faceplanted hard. Released in 2015, this game felt unfinished and rushed, and there’s a good reason for that. Activision’s licensing deal with Tony Hawk was about to expire in late 2015, so they sprinted to push this game out the door in time. The result? A $60 title that barely worked, the physical disc contained almost nothing but the tutorial and a skate park creator, and players had to download a massive day-one patch just to access the rest of the game. Even with the patch, THPS5 was plagued with technical issues: choppy performance, bugs that sent skaters clipping through environments, and physics so wonky it felt like the skateboard was possessed.
Critics absolutely trashed the game’s dull levels and myriad problems. IGN gave it a measly 3.5/10, saying nostalgic fun was drowned out by “poorly thought out levels, control problems, bugs” marveling that “a $60 game in 2015 can be riddled with so many technical issues.” GameSpot was no kinder, scoring it 3/10 and warning that you’d have to ignore “a plethora of obvious issues to find the smallest amount of fun.” Polygon outright named Tony Hawk 5 one of the worst games of 2015, calling it “so broken, so garish and so grim” that it made fans regret ever asking for another sequel. In short, this supposed revival of a beloved series turned out to be a half-baked disaster. It not only skated straight into our worst-of-decade list, it effectively killed the franchise for years (until a far better remake of the older games came along later to heal the pain).
No Man’s Sky will go down in history as a lesson in hype control. The concept sounded amazing: an indie team (Hello Games) promised a literally galaxy-sized game, 18 quintillion unique planets generated by algorithms, a vast universe to explore, and even multiplayer encounters in this endless space sandbox. The hype exploded, especially after Sony backed the project and promoted it heavily. By launch in August 2016, expectations were through the roof… and that roof promptly collapsed. Early players discovered that many of the promised features were missing, most infamously, the game had no multiplayer at launch despite the developer’s earlier hints. Features shown in flashy pre-release demos (massive space battles, diverse creature behaviors, etc.) were nowhere to be found. Instead, players found themselves doing repetitive resource grinding on planets that, despite the astronomical scale, felt surprisingly samey after a while.
The backlash was swift and brutal. While some critics gave mixed or decent reviews, player reviews were overwhelmingly negative. Many felt misled by the marketing – this wasn’t the limitless sci-fi adventure they were sold. To make matters worse, the developers went radio-silent at launch, offering few explanations or apologies initially. This only fueled gamers’ anger, as it seemed Hello Games had “gone dark” after cashing in on everyone’s $60. No Man’s Sky became a punching bag in 2016, cited as a prime example of overpromising and underdelivering. (It even got so bad that the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority investigated whether the game’s marketing was misleading.)
Now, to their credit, Hello Games spent the next few years redeeming this title, today No Man’s Sky is drastically improved with updates that added base-building, true multiplayer, VR support, and more. By its five-year anniversary, player sentiment swung to mostly positive, proving a comeback is possible. But we can’t forget just how spectacularly disappointing the launch was. In 2016, No Man’s Sky didn’t just drop players into a universe of empty planets, it itself became the barren planet upon which gamers heaped their scorn. As one of the decade’s biggest cautionary tales, it earns its spot on this list (even if it eventually patched its way to redemption).
You’d think a Star Wars game would only make headlines for lightsabers and epic battles, but in 2017 Battlefront II managed to become famous (or infamous) for something far less fun: loot boxes. This online shooter from EA sparked perhaps the largest controversy over in-game monetization ever. The game itself was visually stunning and technically sound; the real problem was its greedy progression system. Key playable characters like Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader were locked behind either insane gameplay grinds or pay-to-win loot boxes. One calculation showed it could take 40+ hours of gameplay to unlock just one hero like Vader unless you paid extra. Essentially, Battlefront II was asking full-price buyers to either fork over more cash or slog for dozens of hours to enjoy iconic Star Wars content, turning the Force into a wallet force choke.
The gaming community’s reaction was volcanic. On Reddit, an EA community manager’s attempt to defend the design blew up in their face. EA claimed “the intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment” in unlocking heroes through grinding, a phrase so absurd in context that it instantly became meme fuel. Gamers translated it roughly as: “We’re doing you a favor by making the game a tedious slog.” That Reddit comment went down in history as the most downvoted comment ever, with over 280,000 downvotes from furious players. The outcry grew so bad that Disney (who owns Star Wars) allegedly called EA to say knock it off. EA hastily turned off all microtransactions just before launch to quell the backlash.
Even after patching the economy, the damage was done, Battlefront II became a poster child for corporate greed. Critics gave the game mixed reviews, noting that its actual gameplay was eclipsed by the loot box disaster and the bad PR around it. More importantly, EA’s stock value reportedly dropped by $3 billion within a week of launch, attributed to the backlash. Governments around the world took notice too, using Battlefront II as Exhibit A in debates about whether loot boxes constitute gambling. Ouch. While EA eventually fixed the progression and Battlefront II today is in a healthier state, there’s no doubt that in late 2017 it earned its place as one of the worst games of the decade – not because the lasers and pew-pew were bad, but because it single-handedly ignited an industry-wide firestorm over monetization. The saga proved that when you mess with Star Wars fans (and their wallets), the rebellion strikes back.
Take a beloved single-player RPG series, strip out the NPCs, add multiplayer, sprinkle in countless bugs, and finish it off with some tone-deaf marketing, that recipe gives you Fallout 76. This was Bethesda’s attempt in 2018 to turn its famed Fallout franchise into an online shared-world experience. Unfortunately, it launched as a post-apocalyptic mess (and not in the intentional lore way). Technically, the game was a wreck: it shipped with a huge number of bugs and glitches, even by Bethesda standards, and patches often re-introduced old bugs on top of new ones. Players encountered everything from game crashes and animation oddities to an infamous bug that could erase your entire 50GB game install. Performance was choppy; at times it felt like the real PvP was “players vs. the engine stability.”
Beyond the technical fiasco, Fallout 76 was panned for content and design issues. The world felt empty, literally, as there were no human NPC characters at launch, a bizarre choice that left storytelling to audio logs and robots. The core gameplay loop (scavenging and base-building) became monotonous without the rich narratives Fallout fans expected. And then came the controversies. Bethesda tried to sell overpriced cosmetics and even pay-to-win items in the in-game store despite earlier promises not to do so. They also launched a $100-per-year subscription service (“Fallout 1st”) for the game’s most dedicated players, which landed with a thud as many felt basic features were paywalled and even that service was buggy on release. Perhaps most emblematic was the canvas bag debacle: the $200 Collector’s Edition advertised a fancy canvas duffel bag, but players received a cheap nylon one instead, prompting outrage and accusations of false advertising. (Bethesda’s response was initially blasé, then eventually they offered proper bags, but by then the meme of “#BagGate” was all over the internet.) To add injury to insult, a Fallout 76-branded rum bottle was sold for $80 and turned out to be low-quality booze in a plastic shell, garnering further ridicule. Oh, and we can’t forget the moldy helmet recall: a collector helmet was recalled due to mold growth, which just seemed symbolic of the whole rotten launch.
The reception was so bad that even Bethesda’s top brass acknowledged it. Executive producer Todd Howard admitted, “When [Fallout 76] launched, the litany of issues we had, we let a lot of people down. There was very little we didn’t screw up, honestly.” That pretty much sums it up. While, over time, Fallout 76 received updates (including NPCs and questlines) that improved it and attracted a segment of players, its initial launch is remembered as a textbook failure. From bug-riddled gameplay to marketing snafus, Fallout 76 truly earned its spot as one of the decade’s worst. It’s a game that proved even a Power Armor can’t protect you from bad decisions.
Bioware’s Anthem was supposed to be a rousing sci-fi song of victory, instead, it turned out more like an off-key dirge for the once-renowned RPG studio. Released in early 2019, Anthem was a big-budget online multiplayer shooter where you fly around in mech suits (a cool concept on paper). But it quickly became clear that Anthem was severely undercooked. Despite a lengthy development cycle, insiders later revealed the game was essentially cobbled together in the last 15–18 months due to mismanagement and reboots during development. The final product felt empty and repetitive: a thin story, forgettable characters, and a shallow loot system in a game entirely about grinding for loot. When critics and players got their hands on it, the reviews came in harsh even Anthem’s own developers weren’t surprised. In a candid reflection, former Bioware producer Mark Darrah admitted the negative feedback was justified, noting the Metacritic score landed in the high 50s (a terrible score for a AAA game) and that missions, loot, and story all felt very repetitive or disjointed. In fact, Anthem became Bioware’s lowest-rated game ever at launch, rated even worse than the much-maligned Mass Effect: Andromeda.
Players grew bored quickly after hitting the level cap, as there was virtually no endgame content a death knell for a “live service” looter shooter. The game’s few strong points (fun flying mechanics and pretty graphics) couldn’t make up for the laundry list of problems: disconnects and bugs, loading screens interrupting every activity, and a loot reward system so stingy and uninspired that people joked the real challenge was staying awake. Within weeks, Anthem’s player count nosedived. Bioware did pledge to overhaul the game in a project dubbed “Anthem Next,” hoping for a No Man’s Sky-style comeback, but after a year of silence, even that was cancelled. By 2021, EA threw in the towel they announced they would stop all new development on Anthem, essentially admitting defeat. What was envisioned as a 10-year epic journey turned into a cautionary tale completed in about 10 months.
Anthem’s failure was so notable because it marked the fall of a giant: Bioware, the studio behind Dragon Age and Mass Effect, stumbled trying to chase the online loot-shooter trend. The result was a game that literally had no anthem – nothing for players to rally around. Instead, it’s remembered as one of the decade’s worst games, a high-profile flop that sounded all the wrong notes and faded out quickly, leaving only disappointment echoing in its wake.
By late 2019, gamers thought they’d seen buggy releases and then WWE 2K20 came out swinging, or rather flailing. This professional wrestling game became a punchline almost immediately due to its hilariously awful technical state. How bad was it? Well, one writer described WWE 2K20 at launch as nothing less than a “nightmarish glitch hellscape”. Characters’ bodies would distort into inhuman shapes – wrestlers randomly turned into faceless, hairless skeletons or “quivering piles of geometry meat” due to grotesque animation bugs. Physics went haywire: some moves sent fighters flying or rings collapsing in absurd ways. Graphics would flicker, objects would disappear it was as if the game got hit with a steel chair made of bad code. These glitches weren’t just rare one-offs; they were constant, making every match a potential comedy routine. The situation was so absurd that #FixWWE2K20 began trending as frustrated fans shared glitch montages and memes.
To make matters worse (and funnier in a dark way), when the calendar hit January 1, 2020, WWE 2K20 suffered a Y2K-style meltdown. An internal date bug meant that as soon as the year 2020 arrived, the game completely crashed whenever you tried to play certain modes effectively locking players out of the game at New Year’s midnight. Yes, the game literally couldn’t handle being 2020 despite having “2K20” in its name. It’s like the code itself tapped out and said “I’m done.” (Developers had to scramble out an emergency patch for this unbelievable oversight.)
Reviews were merciless. WWE 2K20 scored “generally unfavorable” ratings from critics across all platforms. Even longtime series fans (accustomed to the occasionally janky annual WWE games) declared this one a new low. The debacle was so bad that the publisher canceled the planned WWE 2K21 installment to give the developers a full extra year to get their act together. When a sports franchise that releases yearly skips a year, you know it’s because the last entry was an unmitigated disaster.
In the end, WWE 2K20 became a legend for how not to ship a game. Its glitches provided endless entertainment on YouTube, sure, but not for the folks who paid $60 expecting a functional game. Whether you’re a wrestling fan or not, this title power-bombed its way into the Worst Games of the Decade with a spectacle of failures – truly the champion of glitches.
No game this decade had a hype-to-disappointment ratio quite like Cyberpunk 2077. Coming from CD Projekt Red (the revered studio behind The Witcher 3), Cyberpunk 2077 had years of anticipation and marketing. Keanu Reeves on stage at E3 yelling “You’re breathtaking!”, flashy trailers, promises of a sprawling futuristic RPG – it was poised to define the generation. And when it finally released in December 2020… oh boy. On a high-end PC, the game showed glimmers of greatness (hence some decent initial reviews). But on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One where millions of people played it – Cyberpunk was practically broken. We’re talking single-digit frame rates, constant crashes, texture pop-in, NPC AI going haywire, T-posing characters, and hilarious (or sad) bugs like cars raining from the sky or cops teleporting behind you out of nowhere. It felt less like a futuristic simulation and more like a dystopian slapstick comedy.
Crucially, it came out later that CDPR withheld console review copies before launch, only sending PC code to reviewers. This meant the ugly truth about performance issues wasn’t widely known until players got their hands on it. The backlash was immediate and immense. Within days, social media was flooded with glitch videos and refund requests. Under pressure, both Sony and Microsoft offered full refunds an almost unheard-of concession for a major title. In fact, Sony went so far as to pull Cyberpunk 2077 from the PlayStation Store entirely just a week after release, a move that stunned everyone. It didn’t return to Sony’s store until half a year later, after some major patches. For a game that sold 13 million copies in its first weeks, this was extremely embarrassing. The phrase “Cyberpunked” became shorthand for botching a highly anticipated launch.
The numbers tell the story: the PC version might have been sitting pretty with a Metacritic in the mid-80s, but the PS4 and Xbox One versions scored in the mid-50s a gigantic drop showing just how badly those versions ran. CD Projekt’s management later admitted they “underestimated” the task of making the game run on old consoles and pushed it out anyway. Their stock took a tumble, and investors even filed lawsuits claiming they were misled about the game’s state. Beyond the technical fiasco, players also criticized the shallow AI and cut content – the game simply didn’t live up to all of its grand promises at launch.
To CDPR’s credit, they did work hard post-launch to improve Cyberpunk. Over 2021 and 2022, they released huge patches fixing thousands of bugs, and the game’s quality notably improved. An anime tie-in (Edgerunners) and the 2.0 update in 2023 even brought many lapsed players back. By late 2023, with the Phantom Liberty expansion, some were saying “Cyberpunk has finally fulfilled its potential.” But let’s be clear: that doesn’t erase the memory of its botched debut. For a game of this profile to launch in such a state was unprecedented it turned what should have been a crowning achievement into a punchline for a time. Cyberpunk 2077 will be remembered as one of the worst launches of the decade, if not one of the worst games in its original form. It’s a testament to how even the mightiest hype can come crashing down in a blaze of glitches and disappointment.
How do you make three of the greatest games of all time into one of the worst releases of the decade? GTA Trilogy Definitive Edition showed us how. In 2021, Rockstar Games (or rather, the small studio they tasked) took Grand Theft Auto III, Vice City, and San Andreas absolute classics and attempted to remaster them for modern platforms. It should have been an easy win. Instead, what players got felt like a rushed, sloppy mobile port wearing a cheap coat of paint. The “Definitive Edition” launched with various visual and technical flaws that ranged from comical to infuriating. Character models were bizarrely altered some beloved characters now looked like bootleg action figures of themselves, with goofy proportions and expressions. A notorious example was the character Denise in San Andreas, whose eyes and face looked completely wrong, sparking memes comparing her to an alien. Environmental details suffered too: the famous GTA rain turned into an opaque white matrix of lines that made the game nearly unplayable in storms. Numerous textual errors on in-game signs (due to AI upscaling gone wrong) turned intended jokes into gibberish for instance, a doughnut shop sign “Tasty Donuts” became “Tasty Doughuts” because the AI thought the faded letter was a blemish and removed it. These little things added up to the world feeling off-kilter and less immersive.
Under the hood, things were even worse. The games were buggy messes: collisions misbehaving, music tracks missing due to expired licenses, and frequent crashes. On PC, Rockstar’s launcher went down for maintenance right after launch and made the trilogy unplayable for days (they were scrambling to remove some files, including hot coffee code and unlicensed songs left in by mistake). When players finally got in, many found the performance inexplicably choppy even on good hardware. And if all that wasn’t enough, Rockstar had delisted the original (and better) versions of these games from sale, forcing the Definitive Edition as the only option. The backlash was swift and fierce. GTA fans are passionate, and seeing their classics treated this way led to review bombs. The Trilogy DE’s user score on Metacritic plunged to an astounding 0.4/10 at one point, among the lowest ever recorded. Critics weren’t pleased either the collection got “mixed or average” reviews at best, and on Switch it scored below 50, making it one of 2021’s lowest-scoring titles on Metacritic.
Rockstar eventually issued a public apology, admitting the games “did not launch in a state that meets our… standards of quality” and promising to fix them. They also brought the original versions back to PC for a time as a make-good. Patches have since addressed some issues and improved visuals (adding back some fog and proper rain, for example), but the initial launch left a permanent stain. It’s almost impressive that a company known for polish and perfection (Rockstar) managed to release something so unpolished. GTA Trilogy Definitive Edition stands as a definitive example that even legendary games can be ruined by a shoddy remaster and why “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it (or at least don’t break it in the process).”
In 2023, a game emerged from the depths of Mount Doom (or perhaps the depths of baffling game design) The Lord of the Rings: Gollum. The premise alone raised eyebrows: you play as Gollum, the emaciated, schizophrenic hobbit-creature, sneaking around Middle-earth in a timeline that mostly doesn’t involve key LOTR events. It’s an odd sell, but it could have been a surprise hit if done well. Spoiler: it was not done well. In fact, Gollum might be the clearest example of a game nobody asked for, delivered in a state nobody deserved. Upon release, it earned “generally unfavorable” reviews across the board, ranking among the lowest-rated games of 2023. Critics and players alike slammed the fundamental gameplay a stealth platformer with clunky controls and sluggish mechanics. Imagine dying over and over from awkward jumps or dull stealth sections, all while controlling a scrawny character who doesn’t even handle like the agile creature Gollum is in the books/films. It’s both boring and frustrating.
Visually, the game looked a generation old. Muddy textures, stiff animations, and environments that did no justice to the grandeur of Middle-earth. Gollum’s character model in-game had an especially janky appearance (some joked he looked like a malnourished avocado). But graphics were the least of the worries given the technical issues. Gollum was riddled with bugs and crashes so much so that at least one outlet said they couldn’t even review it at first because it kept crashing on them. A “Day One” patch did little to help. AI companions and enemies behaved erratically, often breaking the stealth sequences entirely. It’s never a good sign when a game about sneaking is so broken that NPCs either psychicly spot you or brain-dead ignore you.
The gaming community memed on Gollum pretty hard. It felt like a relic from the PS2 era in all the wrong ways. After the mauling it received, the developer (Daedalic Entertainment) actually issued a public apology practically begging players for forgiveness for delivering such an “underwhelming experience” and admitting it “did not meet [the] expectations” they set for themselves. In an extra embarrassing twist, the apology letter itself had a typo (the studio’s name was misspelled), which only fueled jokes that maybe Gollum himself wrote it. The fallout didn’t end there: within weeks, reports came that Daedalic was getting out of the development business entirely, canceling a planned second LOTR game and laying off staff. Gollum essentially cratered the whole studio’s ambitions.
In a decade full of bad games, why does The Lord of the Rings: Gollum deserve a spot? Because it’s a perfect storm of “why did this even happen?” It took one of literature’s most interesting supporting characters and gave him a game that’s utterly joyless to play. It felt like a licensed cash-grab that ran out of budget and inspiration halfway through. For taking something as precious as Tolkien’s lore and delivering a game so not precious, Gollum solidifies itself as one of the worst games of the decade. We gollum to give it a “precious” little award for that (sorry, couldn’t resist).
2023 struck again with another high-profile flop: Redfall. If Gollum showed how a small studio can fumble a beloved IP, Redfall showed that even big studios with pedigrees (in this case Arkane, of Dishonored fame, under Bethesda) can drop the ball and the stake. Redfall was pitched as an open-world co-op shooter where you fight vampires in a quaint island town. Sounds cool, especially coming from Arkane, known for creative gameplay and rich immersive sims. But when Redfall launched, players quickly realized that instead of a sharp, vibrant experience, they’d gotten a lifeless husk. The game’s world was huge but astonishingly empty you could run across town and hardly encounter anything meaningful. The missions were repetitive fetch-quests and area-clearing with minimal story engagement. It felt more like a poor man’s Far Cry than an Arkane title.
Then there were the technical problems and design head-scratchers. The AI, both for enemies and supposed friendly NPCs, was shockingly bad vampires and cultists often just stood there or ran in nonsensical patterns, practically begging to be slaughtered. Playing solo (the game allowed solo or co-op) was especially brutal, as the balance felt off and the game just wasn’t tuned well for single-player despite promises. Visually, Redfall didn’t impress either; it had a stylized art direction that could have been nice, but ended up looking dated, with rough edges and pop-in issues. Performance was iffy on consoles, and worst of all for a shooter, they initially capped it at 30 FPS on Xbox Series X (no performance mode at launch), which irked the community.
The reception was overwhelmingly negative, a rare misfire for Arkane. It scored in the high 50s on Metacritic – “mediocre” territory that was far below expectations. Early players called it one of the worst Xbox first-party releases in years. It was such a black eye that Xbox’s own boss Phil Spencer publicly apologized for the game’s quality, calling its launch “disappointing” and taking full responsibility. He expressed that internal reviews had expected much better and that the outcome was a shock to them. You know a game’s in this worst-of list when the CEO comes out basically saying, “Yeah, we screwed up.” Spencer also noted that delaying it further wouldn’t have fixed the fundamental issues which is a pretty damning statement about Redfall’s core design.
Player counts plummeted within days as word spread that Redfall just wasn’t worth sinking your teeth into. Bugs, lackluster gameplay, broken promises (it was touted as having big narrative and deep systems it didn’t) all contributed to its quick demise. By late 2023, Redfall was largely abandoned, a ghost town eerily similar to its in-game world. It’s a stark reminder that even a team with a great track record can produce a dud if the project doesn’t come together. For being a high-profile vampire game that sucked (the fun out of the room), Redfall absolutely earns its place as one of the worst games of the decade. Let’s just stake this one and move on.
From 2015 to 2025, we’ve witnessed some spectacular gaming faceplants. Each of the titles above failed in unique ways from technical incompetence and broken promises to ill-conceived ideas and greedy monetization. Yet, in a strange way, these disasters are valuable: they offer lessons for developers and cautionary tales for players. Whether it’s Tony Hawk 5’s rushed release or Cyberpunk 2077’s hype burnout, each reminds us that making a great game is hard, and making a legendarily bad game is unfortunately all too easy when oversight falters.
As much as we roast these worst games of the decade, many of them have a silver lining – some were improved post-launch, some spurred industry change (e.g., loot box regulations after Battlefront II), and others at least gave us a good laugh (WWE 2K20 will forever be comedy gold in glitch compilations). If nothing else, they made us appreciate the good games all the more.
Here’s to a new decade of gaming – and fingers crossed that the “Worst Games of 2025–2035” list will have a much higher bar to clear! In the meantime, if you ever feel like things aren’t going your way, just remember: at least you didn’t release Fallout 76 or WWE 2K20. For that, you can take a sense of pride and accomplishment. 😜
