Every decade has its hall of shame, and Collider has gone ahead and ranked the 10 worst video games of the 2020s so far. It's a rough tour through broken launches, dead-on-arrival live services, and sequels that should have stayed in the pitch deck.

Reading a list like this hits different when you lived through some of these launches in real time. I still remember the Discord meltdowns. The refund threads. The moment someone in my raid group said "well, that's ten hours I'm not getting back" and just logged off for the night.

The usual suspects show up here. Massive AAA stumbles that shipped half-finished, live service games that got sunset before their first anniversary, and the kind of cynical licensed cash-ins that feel like they were built in a spreadsheet. The 2020s have been weirdly rich in this category, because so many of these disasters weren't small studios missing the mark. They were huge publishers spending hundreds of millions and still whiffing.

What I appreciate about the ranking is that it does more than dunk for sport. The writeups actually get into why these games failed, whether it was rushed development, baffling design choices, or the classic move of building a game around a monetization model instead of around fun. That last one keeps showing up this decade. You can feel it when you play them, the moment you realize the game was designed backwards from the store page.

The list is also a decent time capsule of how the 2020s broke big-budget gaming. The industry chased trends hard, live service battle passes, blockchain pivots, AI-boosted asset pipelines, and every one of those chases left bodies on the field. Some of the games here were casualties of executives wanting someone else's success instead of their own.

Worth noting, too, that I've been saying for a while mid-size games are the ones most at risk of getting buried under blockbusters, but this list is the flip side of that. The bottom of the barrel this decade is mostly giant, expensive swings. When a double-A game misses, it costs a studio. When a AAA game misses, it costs hundreds of jobs and sometimes the whole company. That imbalance is the real story of the 2020s, and a worst-of list is just where it shows up in its ugliest form.

Anyway, go check the full ranking and see how many you actually played. Did you brave any of these at launch, or did your community warn you off in time? Mine absolutely did, and I owe them for it.