A fun exercise from MSN made me pause this week: a roundup of 20 major games that have gone worryingly quiet since their announcements. The premise is simple. These games got splashy reveals, sometimes years ago, and have barely made a peep since.

I know this feeling intimately. I've been building release calendars all year, and every time I put one of those lists together, the same names get quietly left off because there's nothing new to say about them. You just stop noticing they're gone.

Going through the list, what got me was how many of these I'd genuinely filed away as active projects in my head. Some of them I remember the reveal trailers for clearly, and then nothing. No screenshot, no dev diary, no delay announcement. Silence. And my brain filled the gap with the assumption that development was chugging along somewhere, because that's easier than accepting you don't know.

The list is worth a read because it spans the whole spectrum of why games go quiet. Some of these are almost certainly fine; studios heads-down, marketing clocks not started yet. Silence doesn't automatically mean trouble. Anyone who's watched this cycle long enough knows the gap between reveal and release has stretched enormously over the past two console generations, and a couple years of quiet after a CG trailer is just Tuesday now.

But the inverse is true too, and this is where the worry creeps in. When a game goes years without a single frame of new material, sometimes the real story is the project got rebooted, or reshuffled, or quietly parked. You rarely get an announcement when that happens. The game just stops existing in the news cycle one day, and the only confirmation you ever get is someone involved mentioning it in passing years later. For every silent game that resurfaces with a release date and a bang, there's one that quietly died in a pitch meeting and nobody owed you an explanation.

My rule of thumb after four decades of watching this cycle: worry about silence in proportion to how long it's lasted. A year or two of quiet after a reveal is normal. Stretch it out long enough and you're in record-setting territory, the kind where the game becomes a running joke at awards shows. You know the type.

Go read the full list at MSN and see how many you'd genuinely forgotten. I got to about a dozen before I had to admit the rest had completely fallen out of my head, and tracking this stuff is literally my job.