There are games that rightfully deserve the praise they get and others that are seriously underrated and should have more copies sold than even the largest franchises. Then there’s the handful of games that sold far too many copies. These are the games that shouldn’t be named for fear that the repressed memories of playing them will come back to haunt you.
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Here are our picks of the worst video games that sold millions of copies. No gamers were hurt in the making of this list… aside from myself, who had to recall playing them. Now, these are by no means the worst games ever made (aside from one particular entry), but they really didn’t deserve the sheer number of copies they sold when we compare the gameplay and entertainment value each title has to far better games.
13) Aliens: Colonial Marines
Estimated copies sold: 1.31 million
I definitely played the Alien games in the wrong order because going to Colonial Marines following Isolation made it an impossible fight the former could never win. A buggy Xenomorph meant we were off to a flying start for this shooter as trouble was right around the corner, and it was scary for all the wrong reasons. I’ve played FPS games for so many years that seeing Colonial Marines use the most basic gunplay hurts my very soul. The environment and models look great, yet the generic gunplay makes it a right drag to play through, and it’s only become worse as time goes on.
12) Devil May Cry 2
Estimated copies sold: 1.7 million
You may expect a challenge to come with a Devil May Cry title, but sadly, you’d be mistaken for Devil May Cry 2 is simple, basic, and repetitive. Restrictive and mind-numbing gameplay, a poor story, cheesy cutscenes, and bad environment and character designs made Devil May Cry 2 a skippable title in the franchise. For a game all about feeling good while jumping around to dodge incoming attacks and retaliating with fun melee and occasional gunplay, DMC2 decided it wanted to be more like a shooter. Thankfully, the franchise has taken a turn for the better since, and has learned from its mistakes.
11) BRINK
Estimated copies sold: 2.5 million
I remember picking up BRINK as a teen because I thought the front cover was cool. Ah, life was far simpler back then. Memories of this game have since been repressed, however, as the story and multiplayer played the same boring gameplay loop of a first-person shooter you’d expect to see from early noughties titles. I’ll never understand customization in games where you can never see the character while playing. This is the most underwhelming FPS game to ever exist, and you can’t change my mind about it.
Estimated copies sold: 2.6 million
You’d expect something high quality, seeing as Atari paid tens of millions for the rights to adapt this classic, yet E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial played a role in the video game crash in 1983. Was money put into this game? I don’t know. The result was the most basic, nonsensical, and lazy game that had nothing but misery going for it. Nothing about this game makes sense. You collect dots, fall down and fly out of holes, get chased and put into jail, and do all this impeccably flawless gameplay knowing that you have a step counter that reduces every time you move. Honestly, don’t help E.T go home.
9) Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora
Estimated copies sold: 2.7 million
My sister and I argue about James Cameron’s Avatar: The Game, so I was sure a disagreement was inbound when we tried Frontiers of Pandora. The results were conclusive: we were bored. A video game cannot rely purely on its beauty to carry it, yet Ubisoft was really trying it with this one. It may start strong and lure you in with its gorgeous landscape and open-world exploration, but the repetitiveness in its quests and gameplay will surely lose you along the way. To craft such an elaborate and rich world and ruin it with the same content on a loop, frankly, makes my heart hurt.
8) The LEGO Movie Videogame
Estimated copies sold: 5 million
It might be pure nostalgia, but I love the LEGO Star Wars games. Licensed video games are very hit or miss, and the LEGO series produced a lot of highly entertaining titles, but The LEGO Movie Videogame is not one of them. When the source material is a comedy already, you’d hope it’d follow the same formula, yet the adaptation often falls short in that category and drifts into being boring at times. It’s definitely a pick for the family and not for cold, hard gamers who are used to deflecting lasers and pushing R2-D2 off the map.
7) JUMP FORCE
Estimated copies sold: 5 million
I don’t know how this even sold as much as it did. But of all the anime fighting games you could buy, JUMP FORCE sounded like a no-brainer until you launched the game. In a similar vein as Jujutsu Kaisen: Cursed Clash, both fighting games told the same tiresome tale with awful cutscenes and repetitive gameplay that made it a title to get frustrated and sick of faster than switching from dub to sub because you got sick of Naruto Uzumaki’s voice while watching the TV show.
6) Watch Dogs: Legion
Estimated copies sold: 5 million
This was an incredibly disappointing Watch Dogs entry, as I loved the first and second games. It completely lost its identity and what made it so fun as it swapped out the interesting characters and plot in favor of the one-dimensional recruitment system (like the Shein version of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood). With no real character to align with, it was impossible to get invested when the world was plain and featured mechanics from the other games that were significantly better. This made Legion an easy skip in favor of returning to the first two games for guaranteed immersion and entertainment.
5) Need for Speed (2015)
Estimated copies sold: 9.7 million
I would have happily put Most Wanted (2012) here because they committed a crime against the original (my favorite driving game), but the reboot of Need for Speed in 2015 sure takes the cake. All style, no substance, this title focused more on its live-action cutscenes than the actual racing itself. The entry somehow made a driving game boring as there was nothing to entice me to the driver’s seat. The shift to online play was a painful one, and I honestly missed the gold ol’ days with the iconic wanted posters of the drivers I’d have to race and knock off to reach the top dog. The franchise used to be effortlessly cool. Now, newer titles are underwhelming which is an absolute shame.
4) Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2023)
Estimated copies sold: 21.2 million
As I was an active participant in the golden era of CoD that sunk hours into no scopes with the Invervention, preparing for the inevitable one-versus-one on Rust, and climbing atop the plane at Terminal just because I could. I was ready for the return of MW3, and I’ve never been more disappointed in my life. Modern Warfare (2019) brought me back into the fray after I’d hung up my boots following Ghosts. Multiplayer was the same old, but where I place my value in a CoD game is within its campaign, and MW3 had one of the worst. Filled with short and forgettable missions, alongside the terrible choice to create open missions where you could “explore”, my disappointment for MW3 was (and still is) immeasurable.
3) Pokémon Scarlet and Violet
Estimated copies sold: 26.79 million
Please don’t hurt me, Pokemon fans. I’m a gamer who compares every Pokémon game to the legendary HeartGold and SoulSilver, so when I hopped onto Scarlet and Violet, I was gobsmacked to see the broken mess that it was (and still is). Despite this, Scarlet and Violet have sold a ridiculous number of copies. I’ve only ever wanted free-roam where you can catch Pokemon in the wild (like Arceus), mixed with Gym Leader battles, but alas, I was left making sandwiches in a glitched world, hoping a Ho-Oh would fly above and remind me of better days where Pokémon used to be amazing.
2) Wii Play
Estimated copies sold: 28.02 million
There is nothing more iconic than Wii Sports, as it fills me with such nostalgia. I think of my time creating Miis that look suspiciously too similar to my relatives, knocking my sister out in the ring, hitting it out of the park, and getting a glorious strike. So Wii Play sounded like an obvious next pick. That was until I played it. A title that included a handful of mini-games, Wii Play is the starter pack of video games. As Wii Sports was free as part of a bundle deal, Wii Play, being $49.99 for nine mini-games, was a Nintendo-level ripoff that I cannot get behind.
1) EA FC (FIFA) Every Single Year
Estimated copies sold: 325 million (franchise)
Look, the titles aren’t getting better even though the franchise has adopted a new name. New name, new game, yet EA remains the exact same. If you ask FIFA fans what they think of the newest entry each year, the same thing is always said: “This year is the worst.” So I’ve lumped them all together; thus, we have an entire franchise that has accumulated hundreds of millions in copies sold for producing the same game every year, which may include broken gameplay just to make this title different from the year before. Of course, PES (or eFootball…) deserves to be here too, but I’m a Become a Legend stan, so EA FC takes the hit instead.
