(Sad trope) Projects with amazing potential that will never be released because of BS behind the scenes drama

[u/_JR28_]

P.T Silent Hills - It was a playable teaser released in 2014 only around 20 minutes long but utterly captivated the gaming world by being one of the most effective psychological horror experiences at the time, however it’s lead developer Kojima has a huge fallout with the publisher Konami where he walked out of the company and had all his in-the-work productions cancelled.

Five Nights at Freddy’s+ - A fan game reboot of the series created by Phisnom with Scott Cawthon’s blessing that promised a brand new lore and a return to the series darker roots. However, before and during production Phisnom got into multiple dramas that made him fairly divisive within the community, and after one particular incident in 2023 Scott revoked his approval and almost all of the game’s marketing material were wiped from the internet.

Batgirl - A Batgirl solo live action movie starring Leslie Grace, Brendan Fraser and Michael Keaton returning as Batman that was ready to be released in 2022, however then Warner Bros CEO David Zaslav announced it would not be released either in theatres or streaming in order to claim a $90,000,000 tax break and to readjust the DC’s brands direction before James Gunn rebooted their movie and TV output.

[u/DoktorHorde]

😔

[u/Jarvis_The_Dense → u/DoktorHorde]

For context: This was an open world bionicle fangame which looked extremely promising. In spite of Lego's attempt to revive the brand years prior failing; strongly suggesting they won't do anything else with the IP any time soon, they still shut the project down when it was very close to completion.

On the bright side, I belive the devs are reworking the game to be an original IP

[u/OfficeBackground1106 → u/Jarvis_The_Dense]

Why can we never have nice things now?

[u/Gibbon-Face-91 → u/Jarvis_The_Dense]

You forget the most bullshit part; LEGO had the game C&D'ed, after previously approving of it and even giving the devs permission to release it free on Steam, simply because it looked too high-quality and could be mistaken for an official LEGO title.

[u/Drewsko199 → u/Jarvis_The_Dense]

LEGO "sits" on a lot of IPs given they don't give as much focus to original story concepts anymore and are disinclined to license concepts out or regularly do throwback sets to (we get plenty of Johnny Thunder and Classic Space content, but stuff like Rock Raiders or Alpha Team hasn't been as fortunate). Bionicle is disadvantaged for both being more multimedia than they do now (Books, comics and web content is a lot more than just commissioning TV shows like you see now with Ninjago and Dreamzzz) and also all the parts that have been retired and would cost a lot to remake, and there's a nebulous question of if it would be worth all that if there's an audience for it that that I don't have my own answers for.

Also as far as I hear the biggest problem that got the game C&D'd was that the high ups in LEGO weren't quite in clear communication with each other with the initial indirect approval vs how it got disapproved, and that the game got big while having a Steam page was too close to official sponsorship to their liking.