10 Games That Surprised Everyone with Their Success

Introduction

Sometimes announcements for games are just too good to be true, and they turn out to be, well, scams. We've all been burned so much that frankly, it's easy to believe anything that looks really good is a scam, but it's not always the case. Sometimes they end up being awesome games. Hi folks, this is Zaid Ikram, and today on Gamix, 10 games everyone thought were scams but turned out to be great.

Black Myth: Wukong

Starting off with number 10, it's Black Myth: Wukong. There are so many trailers that come out these days that are too good to be true. I mean, look at The Day Before. Those trailers were extremely impressive, but you all know how that game actually turned out to be. That one was a shit sandwich if I've ever seen one, not tasted one. Seen one. 

In many ways, Black Myth looked like something similar, a flashy trailer from a studio most people have never heard of. These guys started out as just a small team of about seven before ramping up production after that first pre-alpha trailer. If it wasn't a scam, these guys were just biting off way more than they could chew.

There was no way this was going to be anywhere close to what they were showing in those trailers, right? I mean, it had to be at least kind of a scam. Good things like this don't just happen. There's just no way. Not even big billion-dollar companies were making games that looked this good. Something had to be off here.

Folks online were skeptical at first, and after The Day Before crashed and burned, the cynicism surrounding the game only got worse, at least in certain corners of the internet. When it became obvious that the game was at least coming out, a lot started to speculate based on previews that the final product was gonna be little more than a boss rush and maybe more of a tech demo than an actual complete game.

I mean, the devs managed to prove all the skeptics wrong. Black Myth was a real game, and it's huge. And I do want to say that it was one of the games that I thought was gonna turn out to be a good one, a real one. And it was. Sometimes game devs can pretty much come out of nowhere with an amazing game. It's rare, but it happens.

Palworld

At number nine is Palworld. Even more than Wukong, the premise of Palworld sounds like a big old scam. I mean, it's an open-world survival game with guns and Pokémon. It's everything you like, all jammed together into one game. That is very often the premise of a scam game. And look at the first trailer. It looks like a scam.

It looks fake. Looks like the sort of thing a guy would make using CGI to trick non-gamers into investing into his fly-by-night Kickstarter. But Palworld had at least two things going for it. For one, these guys have made a game before. Another key thing is that there was no Kickstarter. They just made the game.

It's early access, which is sometimes a red flag, but the game they released was surprisingly polished and mostly feature-complete for an early access game. That didn't stop some people from claiming the game was a scam, though. They claimed that the game stole assets from the Pokémon developer Game Freak.

Well, The Pokémon Company said they investigated and nothing came of it. Most of the anger surrounding the game from Pokémon fans has died down. But before and around release, man, some people were mad as hell about Palworld. Between the developers, who by their own admission, have no idea what they were doing and were in way over their heads, and the absurd premise of the game, I can see why people assumed it was, you know, a scam.

But it wasn't. Through some miracle, it came through and ended up being much better than it had any right to be.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance

At number eight is Kingdom Come: Deliverance. This is the first, but far from the last, Kickstarter game that will show up on this list. Unlike previous games where the extent of the scam was just that the game might not actually come out, this game had the distinct possibility people who backed it would get nothing back from their investment.

Kickstarters are risky by nature. You basically donate money to someone in the hopes that they return the favor. Once that money is back in their hands, that's it. If they don't deliver the goods, you're SOL. Shit outta luck. By the time Kingdom Come announced their Kickstarter, many high-profile failures had eroded consumer confidence in the platform.

And basically any high-profile game like this was gonna have people assume it's a scam. To the skeptics' credit, there was reason for concern. I mean, it was a first-time team making a very ambitious, open-world medieval simulation. Their Kickstarter was honest about the difficulty of the project they were working on, and the devs were actually made up of veterans of the industry who had worked together on other projects like Mafia II.

But there are plenty of examples of misleading information on Kickstarter pages. So there's no way to know if anything they were saying was actually true. And the original release plans got potential backers' guards up. There was gonna be this episodic, multiple-act release structure, which didn't seem realistic.

The final game didn't end up being quite as big as they had originally promised, and it was pretty buggy when it first came out. But overall, they managed to fulfill their promises from the Kickstarter and made a pretty impressive game.

Cuphead

At number seven was Cuphead. Another one of those types of games that looks so ambitious in the trailer that it just can't come out.

There are countless examples of this sort of thing in the past. Radio the Universe, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden 2, or Heart Forth, Alicia, the list goes on. Cuphead looked like the type of game that was fated to be vaporware. Just another exciting indie that was never going to come out or it would come out and be nothing like the game they initially promised.

That's one we've seen time and time again. Discussion around the game was generally positive around the initial announcement, but there were definitely people thinking this was never gonna see the light of day. Well, they did prove it was real by previewing the pre-release build. And the overwhelming response was disappointment in the game's original short length.

Impressions were good otherwise, but they knew they were gonna have to make the game bigger, which was gonna take time and money. This kind of ramping up in game development can lead to disaster. A lot of indie developers buckle under that sort of pressure. Even major outlets were skeptical about the game at that time.

Wired put the game in its 2016 vaporware list. Cuphead did manage to prove the doubters wrong, though. It's one of the landmark indie games of the last decade, sold more than a million copies in its first two weeks. There really wasn't anything to worry about. But again, big ambition, small team. It scares people.

Eiyuden Chronicles: Hundred Heroes

And number six is Eiyuden Chronicles: Hundred Heroes. If there's one thing we've come to learn, it's that if a celebrated Japanese game developer attaches their name to a Kickstarter project, don't put money in it. If they do that, just start running. Project Phoenix, Mighty No. 9, Red Ash, Shenmue 3, some of these things put out actual games, but anything trying to make a spiritual successor to some classic JRPG or something, it's gonna fail. 

They'll pull a Project Phoenix and take all your money, string you along for years, and disappear into the night. JRPG products made by veterans are just cursed. They're either scams or cursed. Or both. Either way, they never work. Minus the random outlier, like Bloodstained, enter Eiyuden Chronicles. 

This game was sold as a spiritual successor to the Suikoden series, and the project was led by Yoshitaka Murayama, the creator of that series, the Suikoden guy. It made a shocking amount of money. It was the third highest video game Kickstarter of all time, just below Shenmue 3 and Bloodstained. 

But many fans were still extremely skeptical the game would ever come out. Making JRPGs is hard. These are huge games. It doesn't matter whether they're 2D or 3D or whatever, they just have tons of unique assets. And if you're doing voice acting, that's a huge undertaking. It's pretty standard to do voice acting nowadays, too. 

And this wasn't just gonna be a basic JRPG, it was following Suikoden, which has multiple combat systems, an entire base management aspect, and more than a hundred heroes to recruit. It was originally gonna come out in 2022, but it got delayed due to Covid. And for a while things looked really touch-and-go with the game. 

The game's director tragically passed before the game came out, but they were able to finish it in 2024 and mostly to a positive response. That the game came out at all is a minor miracle. So, it's kind of amazing it's complete. It's a massive complex game with a lot going on. And that's exactly what fans of the old Suikoden games want.

Vampire Survivors

At number five is Vampire Survivors. This exploded in popularity outta nowhere and it looks like a phone game. It's gotta be a scam, right? It's so cheap. It's gotta be predatory somehow. Right? Where are the loot boxes? Where are the real money currencies? Vampire Survivors is exactly what it is. Nothing more, nothing less. The developer's experience in the gambling industry is actually used for good rather than evil here. It's got all of the dopamine-activating flashing lights and sounds to keep you hopelessly addicted without trying to get anything at all from you. It's all just in service of a fun game.

There were some grumblers about certain sprites that the game used, which are very similar to certain Castlevania sprites. But as the developer made clear, they purchased a very popular asset pack without realizing how close some of the sprites were. It's a small mistake. They're not ripping Castlevania off. The game isn't even remotely similar.

System Shock Remake

At number four is the System Shock Remake. The classic MO of the scam Kickstarter is to put out a flashy trailer, get a whole bunch of money from gullible backers, then procrastinate like all life depended on it. Make excuses. Say your dog ate your homework. Who cares? All that matters is that you have plausible deniability by the time the accusations of fraud start getting thrown around. But by then, hopefully you're gone. You've left, you've disappeared. That's how to scam. At least that's what it looks like they do.

Maybe they do something much more complex and clever. It doesn't seem like it, though. For a few years though, it was really looking like the System Shock Remake was never happening. It took so long with so many complete resets in development that I wouldn't blame anyone for thinking this was some long con.

You can only start over from scratch so many times before you start to look like the boy who cried bad engine. That's only scratching the surface of the game's troubled development, too. At first it was gonna be a very accurate remake, then it was gonna be a complete overhaul, then it was gonna be a modern thing, then an old-school thing.

Eventually, they decided on a kind of hybrid style that ended up working really well. The game was stuck in development hell for around seven years. But the completed game was an excellent remake/remaster. It modernized the game in a few smart ways with a mind on keeping everything that made the game unique intact.

The game was very touch-and-go during development. It could have been a mess and I wouldn't blame anyone for starting to think the whole project was a scam. But they managed to reach the light at the end of the tunnel and release a game that was so much better than most of us assumed it would be.

Final Fantasy VII Remake

At number three is the Final Fantasy VII Remake. No one thought this was gonna be a literal scam, more like it was gonna be vaporware like Beyond Good & Evil 2. At worst, it could have been one of those situations where Square Enix was purposely misleading investors, keeping stock prices high by promising a Final Fantasy VII Remake that they never had any intention of making.

Teasers for this thing go all the way back to 2005. Like, it was something people were speculating about for years and years. It was like Kingdom Hearts III but worse. Just this endlessly teased thing that seemed like it was never going to happen. Even after getting fully announced in 2015, skepticism was sky-high, and you can't really blame fans for assuming the worst at that point.

Square wasn't exactly firing on all cylinders back then. The strange and inconsistent Final Fantasy XIII series, the mess that was the original launch of XIV, the half-finished mess that was XV. The series' track record wasn't looking so good back then and it seemed like a distinct possibility the remake would never see the light of day.

Barely any information about that game came out between 2015 and 2019. And the stuff they did reveal mostly came off as fake. They were gonna split the game into three parts? Yeah, okay, sure. Sounds very episodically Kickstarter-y. And basically nobody believed it was gonna happen until it did. And even holding a physical copy, the game didn't seem real at the time.

It happened. It's got the best battle system the series has seen in years and it's visually stunning. Now, are they actually gonna finish the trilogy? Who knows. Ask me again in 2027, or whenever the final part is supposed to come out. But I mean, we got two of the three parts at this point. So, not bad, not bad.

Omori

At number two is Omori. The success of games like Undertale led to a flood of minimalist indie RPGs that just, I mean, you couldn't go on Kickstarter without seeing one. One of the most interesting was Omori. It looked good. But soon after the Kickstarter ended, the developer stopped communicating. They'd pop back in occasionally to give a status update, but it was the kind of thing that could easily be viewed as them trying to placate backers. This went on for six years, far longer than the initial Kickstarter estimates.

So, most backers assumed the project was dead. Either the dev ran outta money or they're just stringing the supporters along. Whatever. Didn't look good for the game. I imagine everybody was pretty surprised when the game released Christmas 2020 to rave reviews. It ended up being the best in the new wave of indie RPGs, or at least one of the best.

Depends on your perspective. I don't blame backers for starting to think this was a kind of scam. They were really long droughts in communication, but sometimes you just gotta let a guy cook.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

And finally at number one, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. It's less that the game itself was considered a scam and more its reputation was damaged by associations with the sketchy dealings of its publishing partner, 38 Studios.

The general narrative around 38 Studios, and its founder Curt Schilling, is that they defrauded the state of Rhode Island out of a $75 million loan and nearly bankrupted the state. And that negative attention often gets directed onto the game, which isn't fair. 38 Studios was definitely in over its head. They had no idea what they were doing.

And honestly, Rhode Island clearly did not either. But the game, this game specifically, not the MMO they were planning on at the time, was mostly insulated from that. 38 Studios didn't make Kingdoms of Amalur, Big Huge Games did. And these guys had a proven track record of quality. They made Rise of Nations, one of the best RTSs of all time.

And the actual game, separate from all controversy, is pretty damn solid. It's got a fun, real-time combat system, a detailed and dense world. Sure, it seems like playing a more active MMO a lot of the time, but in this game's case, it works.

The game actually sold pretty well, too. It surpassed a million copies, but 38 Studios was bleeding money to make it on expensive real estate and big paychecks. So, the only thing they were going to do to recoup development costs was if the game sold 3 million copies, minimum. That wasn't gonna happen. They didn't have a chance to hell of that. And because of that, it killed Big Huge Games, who were actually pretty talented developers.

The story around the game tends to overshadow everything else, but it's a pretty darn good game actually. It's pretty great if you can get past the bizarre Curt Schilling association. And honestly, I can. I'm fine with it. I don't care.

Conclusion

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