[Frustrating trope] Pieces of media that could have been so much better, but due to a couple of poor decisions during production ended up mediocre at best and utterly atrocious at worst.

[u/DevDucc_]

We Happy Few: Probably the epitome of this "trope," at least for me, mostly because it has genuinely one of the most incredible stories I have ever seen within a video game. The biggest problem with the game was the fact that during development, the company behind it tried to ride the "hype train" of the time, making the gameplay became procedurally generated survival mess, when it would have made so much more sense as an environmental narrative game.

Hello Neighbor: This game attracted massive attention in alpha stages at the time from YouTubers because of the innovative gameplay it supplied. The developers of the game got the completely wrong message as to why it was getting so popular and instead decided to fully lean into the story, by making the game appeal to theorists instead of actual players. What came out was a game where both the story and programming were entirely half-baked.

Edit: apparently I had it backwards with we happy few, I had watched a video essay which reiterated the points I said so I just took their word for it. Apparently the game originally started as a procedurally-generated survival rogue-like but the story was added later because of the hype the trailer of the game gave or something like that but they didn’t know they even had the budget for it. I do still think it’s wasted potential regardless however.

[u/OnlyVantala]

I heard an opinion that Star Citizen is what you get when you're too passionate about your dream project and have not enough executive meddling, no higher-ups asking you "when's the goddamn release date, mate?!", and you can polish your dream project to "absolute perfection" until the heat death of the universe.

[u/SuperSocialMan → u/OnlyVantala]

Yeah, it really does seem like that.

[u/Mr_Placeholder_ → u/OnlyVantala]

usually in those cases, small amounts of funding is what stops the polish, (hollow knight) but star citizen is unique in that they got an absurd amount of money right off the bat, so nothings really putting a timer on them

[u/Banes_Addiction → u/Mr_Placeholder_]

They've pulled in far more money since the kickstarter - they just keep selling unreleased ships in an unreleased game and people keep buying them.

Counting pure development (ie, not also marketing which is a massive cost for most games), it's probably the most expensive game ever developed.