Over the years there have been some very high profile and devastating failures in the world of game development and involving game engines specifically. Today we look at some of the biggest blunders in game development history!
1 – Unity Run-time Fee Fiasco
In 2023 Unity decided to retroactively charge all Unity developers a fee for using the Unity runtime. This of course did not go over well. In fact it resulted in the company losing billions of dollars in valuation, the entire executive suite being purged and much more. Learn More
2 – GameMaker DRM “Oops”
Then owner Yoyo Games decided to fight back against people that pirated the GameMaker game engine by permanently altering game assets with a pirate skull and crossbones. Unfortunately, they screwed up and not only pirated copies got hit… paying customers did as well! Learn More
3 – EA Multiple Issues
EA is actually here for multiple issues related to game development. First, they forced all of their in-house developers to use the Frostbite game engines leading to high profile issues at Bioware. EA were also responsible for buying up and killing off the most popular game engine of the PS2 era – Renderware. Finally in non-game engine related news, EA earned its back to back Worst Companies in America awards with the high-profile EA Spouse labour dispute.
4 – BuildBox Insane Pricing Changes
Price increases are never popular, but BuildBox took it to the next level. In 2021 the No-Code game engine decided to switch to a revenue share pricing model… with a 70/30 (not 30/70… 70/30!) revenue split! Learn More
5 – The Machinery Termination
The developers behind the Bit Squid/Stingray (spoiler alert!) game engines went on to launch a new game engine called Our Machinery/The Machinery. Then suddenly without warning they retroactively changed their EULA and forced all customers to delete the game engine withing 2 weeks! Learn More
6 – Autodesk KIll Multiple Game Developer Products
Oh… Autodesk… They make the list for multiple reasons, but most specifically about all the game development products they bought, then failed to market and ultimately killed off. That list includes Softimage, the Stingray game engine, Scaleform, Beast and much more. Learn More
7 – Amazon Lumberyard
Amazon really tried to enter the game development industry in a big way. They purchased multiple game studios, licensed a copy of CryEngine that they rebranded as Lumberyard and intended to use in house at all of their studios, as well as releasing it for free to the entire game development community. A few years later almost all of the studios they purchased/founded are gone and Lumberyard has been open sourced as O3DE. Learn More
8 – CryTek/CryEngine Multiple Issues
CryTek has been a constant source of mistakes over the last decade or so. To many errors to list in one paragraph, although thankfully we covered the topic in more detail in this report earlier in 2025. CryEngine had the potential to big as big of a player as Unreal or Unity but brutal mismanagement and other factors made that an impossibility.
You can learn more about all of these game development fails in the video below. If you have other suggestions or your own list of game development/game engine failures you think should have made this list let me know in the video comments or on the GameFromScratch discord server.