The most recent example of this is Concord, a game developed by a studio owned by Sony that was released and the pulled from market after about two weeks after it's release.
There's lots of chatter about why this failed, but my personal thought is that the game didn't hit well because there are already many other games just like it floating around that are free to play. Overwatch, Valorant, Apex Legends, Fortnite, all have modes that sound like the same thing that Concord was offering. Without some interesting hook or gameplay mechanic that would make the game unique I'm not shocked to hear that it flopped.
Looking at a bunch of games that were huge in their day many of the sequels are just re-hashes of the same game over and over again.
If you look at what's been going on this year it's painting a interesting photo;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023%E2%80%932024_video_game_industry_layoffs
It's not just one game being canceled this year, that link has a list of multiple game studios that have been closed, and paints a rough picture of the layoffs that have happened this year. And honestly my thought is there are just too many games that are being positioned as AAA games that are rehashes of the same dammed thing over and over again and I think that people are starting to notice and are getting less and less interested.
I've been around long enough to remember the video game crash in the early 80's that happened. And I'm feeling that we are looking at something similar. I don't think that we will see the industry completely collapse and burn, but I would not be shocked to see more larger studios collapsing and taking smaller ones with it as they go. And honestly while I can sympathize with the folks caught in this I also think that might not be a bad thing. My hope would be that the process would carve room for some new developers to come up with something that's not a rehash of existing games and stories.
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