It’s almost poetic that, in a genre built on many people fighting to stay alive until just a few remain, so many battle royale games have launched, flopped, and died over the last few years. Not every new battle royale can find the same success as Warzone or PUBG. In fact, most will be lucky to survive at all. And many haven’t, as this list shows.
While fan-made mods have added battle royale-like modes to games like Arma, the genre truly exploded with the release of Player Unknown’s Battleground and, shortly after, Fortnite’s take on the genre. These games exploded in popularity, with Fortnite alone jumping from 20 million users in 2017 to 125 million in 2018. Publishers took notice, and more studios began spitting out battle royales to cash in on the trend. And it makes sense. These games aren’t too tricky to make if you already have a shooter engine or existing IP that works within the genre and a talented team of devs. However, they need constant upkeep, fresh content, and a large player base to live. And that’s not easy to achieve.
So, as we wrap up our fantastic week focused on battle royale games, it seems like the perfect time to stop and acknowledge all the games that tried to survive and thrive, but in the end, for various reasons, didn’t make it. They all got sniped from afar and were left in a ditch, surrounded by digital corpses of other failed attempts to be the next Apex Legends or Fortnite.
