For many gamers, video games are a means of entertainment that allows them to spend countless hours learning incredible stories, but the reality is different for development companies. This is a business that can involve exorbitant amounts of money that for many of us may be inaccessible.

For this reason, developing a video game that has a considerable investment can be a double-edged sword. If the game's sales are high, the company can recover the money invested plus the profit, but if the opposite is the case, they can have catastrophic losses, even to the point of extinguishing the developer completely.

One of the main videogames in history that caused big losses for his company was Shenmue, which reached an investment of 70 million dollars, something that by that time (1999) was a figure never reached before in the videogame area, but by selling a little more than 1 million units, it would make the company go into the red.

Next, I'll show you some video games that fit this profile perfectly, having really big consequences for their development companies.

Driv3r

Driver was one of the most renowned videogames released on the first PlayStation, both the first and second installments received very good reviews from specialists and players, however, we can't say the same about your third sequel called Driv3r which had terrible sales at the time of its release.

For the development of this game it took more than 3 years, besides taking a budget of 34 million dollars, this had as a consequence that its developer company called Reflections Interactive ended up with negative numbers, so Atari, the distributor, decided to sell it to Ubisoft for 24 million dollars, a figure that would help them recover part of the costs of Driv3r.

Aliens: Colonial Marines

A video game that when announced filled many gamers with expectations in various parts of the world. It promised to be the most incredible game of the franchise of all times, with outstanding gameplay and graphics, however, when it was launched the reality was totally different.

The game received very low reviews by both specialists and users, one of the main reasons being its poor artificial intelligence and a world full of bugs. This led to its sales being a disaster, with losses in the millions for both Sega (distributor) and Gearbox (developer).

Pac-Man (Atari 1982)

We see Atari again, but this time we go back to 1982 when the Atari 2600 dominated the market. This company made a contract with Namco to distribute their star video game called Pac Man on their console, this way they would ensure a complete success due to the amounts of sales they could generate, but the opposite would happen.

The video game was one of the worst portals made at that time, it had a number of bugs that made it completely unplayable. Due to the millions of cartridges that were not sold, Pac-Man represented a loss of millions of dollars for Atari, this added to other games like E.T. in 1983 had a loss of 500 million dollars, generating the crash of video games in that year.

These were some videogames that had super millionaire losses in the videogame industry, if you know another one that fits this list you can indicate it in the comments section.

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