Video Game Franchises That Died On Mobile

There’s only one fate worse than death for a video game franchise. Pivoting to mobile…and then death. But that’s exactly what happened to these poor games.

 

Driver

Despite being the series that proved to the world that 3D open world games about criminals would be the future of gaming, Driver has been given a bit of a rough ride over the years. So rough that it crashed into a ditch. And turned into a boat. And then exploded.

The first two games stand among the pinnacle of the PS1’s driving games, but after that, the record becomes spottier than 101 Dalmatians without skincare routines.

Driver 3, or Driv3r if you’re a freak, was considered to be nothing less than an unmitigated dumpster fire. The follow-up, Driver: Parallel Lines, was a bit of an improvement in terms of critical reception, it didn’t exactly set the world alight.

Surely that all changed with the almost universally beloved Driver: San Francisco, though? Shockingly, no.

Despite some of the strongest reviews across the whole series, and a report from Ubisoft that Driver actively exceeded the company’s expectations, San Francisco was the final home console entry in the series. It’s also not available digitally anymore, which stinks.

In the same month as San Francisco, though, Ubisoft would also launch Driver: Renegade 3D for the 3DS. Critics did not mesh with it, the sales were awful, and that was basically it for Driver.

The last we heard of Tanner and the Driver series was the short-lived mobile game, Driver: Speedboat Paradise, which saw Tanner team up with the player character to take down some kind of speedboat racing…mafia?

This mobile game ditched the open world gameplay entirely, and while it’s unique for being the only Driver game where you can get behind the wheel of a speedboat, that’s about the only good thing you can say about it. Sure, the 3DS game might have been weak, but Ubisoft had a successful and well-liked hit on their hands, and they capitalised on it in the same way that WWE capitalises on its own naturally popular talent: firing them.

 

Breath of Fire

Ask someone to name Capcom’s premier RPG franchise these days, and they’re going to respond with Monster Hunter, guaranteed. Before Monster Hunter was even a twinkle in Capcom’s eye though, the Japanese giant had another RPG series that managed to compete with even the likes of Final Fantasy and others.

I’m of course talking about Breath of Fire.

Debuting for the SNES in 1993, the Breath of Fire series was, for about 10 years at least, Capcom’s answer to the rising tide of RPG titles. It offered best in class gameplay and mechanics across the SNES, PS1, PS2, Game Boy Advance and even the PSP. With five games in the series across that time, fans had plenty to sink their teeth into, but for whatever reason, Breath Of Fire strongly pivoted into the world of mobile games.

Between 2003 and 2008, Capcom released four additional Breath Of Fire mobile spin-offs, starting with Breath of Daifugō, which was a simulated version of the Japanese card game featuring Breath of Fire IV characters, which was followed up with Breath of Fire: Ryū no Tsurishi, based on the fishing game of BoF IV. Throw in two action RPG spin-offs based on, you guessed it, Breath of Fire IV, and you’ve got mobile games coming out of the damn walls, but that’s not where Breath Of Fire finally died.

While Breath of Fire VI launched on PC as well as mobile devices, the free-to-play MMORPG with mobile-first design launched in Japan in 2016 and never really found the audience willing to properly adopt it. Perhaps that’s due to the awful freemium mechanics, or because it was seen as a “half-hearted attempt at reviving the franchise”, according to some commentators. The game was delisted about a year later, and the series has been dormant ever since.

 

Commander Keen

Most people know id Software for their work on the DOOM series of games.

But if you were around in the MS-DOS days of the 90s, you might be familiar with a lot of their other work, including the Commander Keen series.

Back then, they were known as Ideas From The Deep, no relation, but the game did follow the eponymous character who was actually the secret identity of the 8 year old boy Billy Blaze. Any resemblance to DC and Shazam’s Billy Batson is purely coincidental, I imagine. But across four MS-DOS games and one Game Boy Colour port/sequel, Commander Keen was one of the better examples of a platformer that didn’t take itself too seriously.

The Game Boy Colour revival in particular saw the series return after a 10 year hiatus, and then promptly go on an even longer hiatus. Even if reviews weren’t stellar, that’s usually not enough for a series to be completely abandoned in the way Commander Keen was. It took 18 years after the 2001 release of the Game Boy Colour game for anyone to hear anything on a new Commander Keen game.

So when Bethesda announced the series was returning as a PVP mobile game, the reception was mixed, to say the least.

After being announced at a Bethesda showcase during E3 2019, Bethesda wouldn’t mention the game again for over a year, until it was noticed that all reference on social media and beyond had been scrubbed from the internet.

Oh, how the titans fall.

 

Titanfall

Look, I know what you’re thinking: Titanfall hasn’t died as a mobile game, because the Titanfall universe is still plodding along as Apex Legends. You’d be correct of course, even if a Titanverse game without Titans is like a custard cream without the custard-adjacent goodness, but that’s the reality we live in.

But how did we get here?

Titanfall 1’s blend of multiplayer and story might have been a bit weird and moored to a console that came out of the gates with one leg, but critics were excited about the potential of this new franchise. With 10 million unique players within two years, a sequel was inevitable.

Enter Titanfall 2, which was considered an improvement in most ways, but was given the impossible task by EA to sell another 10 million copies in one year despite being sandwiched between Battlefield 1 and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. Titanfall fans tried their very best to support TF2, but according to studio head Vince Zampella, it could’ve done better.

However, before Respawn crammed Titanfall down into the battle royale content mines, they and Particle City did release one last effort to keep the specific Titanfall brand going: the mobile RTS game Titanfall: Assault.

Playing out like your typical strategy/MOBA games that you can find within ten seconds on any mobile game store, you control both pilots and titans as they compete for control over key objectives blah blah blah. You’ll know how I feel about this one if you’ve watched our forgotten spin-offs video. The characters, the levels and design all screamed Titanfall, but the key fan base just wasn’t looking to play a mobile RTS game when they’re used to fast-paced, FPS gunplay.

Despite launching in August 2017, Assault was delisted in just under a year’s time, and the Titanfall brand became doomed to be a footnote in Apex Legends’ history. They also tried to make Titanfall into a card game for a minute. Just cos, I guess.

 

Just Cause Mobile

Of all the franchises mentioned today, Just Cause might just be the one that has the most life left in it. And, as happens to be typical for this channel, some news broke as we were writing the script. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Open world games if they were directed by Michael Bay, every Just Cause game has followed the same basic premise: drop you into an active dictatorship, and give you enough tools to have fun in this ultimate virtual sandbox. Press three buttons and you’re Icarus with a rocket launcher. It’s brilliantly unpretentious stuff.

Whether it’s from lead character Rico Rodriguez’s signature, gravity-defying grappling hook, his always handy and deployable parachute or the rocket powered wingsuit that was added in later games, Rico is like Iron Man without the Iron.

Across four games, Rico’s adventures see him battle tyranny and oppression with explosions, and though reviews have never been perfect for the series, it’s undeniably been fun the whole time.

Just Cause 4’s very mid reception unfortunately brought the series to a screeching halt however, with the lowest review scores the series had ever seen. Sales for the game were so low that then-Square Enix president Yosuke Matsuda singled out Just Cause 4 as the reason for Square’s low operating income.

Square would try to get their money’s worth still though, as in 2020, they announced Just Cause Mobile, which offered a top-down multiplayer game with co-op and PVP for up to 30 players. Just Cause Mobile saw a limited early access regional launch in some areas in 2021, including Singapore, but by 2023, the project was fully cancelled. I can’t tell you how it actually was as a game, but I can only assume: not good.

Meanwhile, and here’s the recent news, apparently Square also commissioned Sumo Digital to make Just Cause 5, but it came out recently that it got canned too.

 

Ridge Racer

If it wasn’t for the fact that there hasn’t been a new entry in the series for about a decade, you could make the case that Ridge Racer is the second longest running active racing game series in history. Ridge Racer originally released in arcades in 1993, while Super Mario Kart came out in 1992.

Digression aside, Ridge Racer was, for about a decade and a half at least, a core pillar of Namco’s identity and output, arguably comparable to Tekken. Across 16 mainline games, 3 console generations and with more cars than the character list of a certain Disney Pixar movie — that’s right, Planes — Ridge Racer was a giant in the arcade racing space. But giants can only stand tall for so long.

While the arcade racing genre certainly isn’t as popular as it once was, Ridge Racer arguably brought about its own demise.

For much of the series’ history, Ridge Racer was developed in-house by Bandai Namco, and mostly, they put out whippers. But for 2012’s Ridge Racer Unbounded, the license was given to Bugbear Entertainment, best known for creating Flatout. Their end result, the aforementioned Unbounded, bore none of the famous Ridge Racer hallmarks, and instead played out like a weak Burnout clone with a dubstep soundtrack.

Reviews were, honestly, kinder than they should have been for a game that has all the charm and grace of a reversing dump truck without any wheels on. But clearly the Ridge Racer fans refused to buy in too, as there hasn’t been a new home console Ridge Racer release since.

Fear not, here comes some barely remembered mobile games to save the day! Mobile fans had two more games from 2013 to 2016, Slipstream and Draw & Drift. The former was a pretty fun adaptation of Ridge Racer to mobile, but Draw and Drift was a weird experiment where you’d draw on a track where you’d want the car to go…and that’s the basis for the final ever Ridge Racer game.

The Initial D game Drift Spirits also featured some Ridge Racer collabs. But the future of the series looks about as blank as a freshly covered snowy mountain.

 

SSX

Video games have long had a love affair with snowboarding. Perhaps that’s due to the inaccessibility of skiing and snowboarding as a whole. Not just everyone can simply head out to their nearest mountain and start shredding. Tubular. Gnarly. Rad. And so on.

That’s why games that offer extreme sports in the comfort of your home are popular, and no snowboarding game was more popular than SSX. Sure, snowboarding games have come and gone both before and after SSX’s lifespan, but none have managed to match up to the sheer cultural legacy and impact those PS2 era games have had on an entire genre. These days, any kind of snowboarding game has to match up to the legend of SSX. Most of the time, the legend wins.

So why has SSX died out?

After the golden trio of SSX Tricky, SSX 3 and SSX On Tour, the series lost focus.

SSX Blur for the Wii was simply a hodgepodge of previous tracks and assets cobbled together to capitalise on the motion controls wave, so EA rebooted the series with 2012’s SSX. While a decent game, and plenty of fun in its own right, this new version of SSX focused on real-life mountains, online integrations, the inclusion of gear to conquer the “deadly descents” and generally offered a more realistic art style and tone. It’s good, but it’s not quite the SSX fans loved, so sales suffered, and there’s been no new game since. Well, apart from this.

Did you know, EA ported a condensed version of SSX 2012 to LG G2, before porting it again to Xperia Z1 and Z Ultra users a little while later.

And that’s genuinely the last look we ever got at SSX. If you want to play it yourself in 2025, the files can be found online for those willing to look… matey. Not that we’d encourage that behaviour at all, of course. It’s just not tennis.

 

Virtua Tennis

Look, we get it. You come here to see us talk about the weird and obscure RPGs and platformers, or you’re just here because you like the way I say whipper. Seeing us go from that to talking about a tennis series is probably going to give some of you whiplash, but you do have to bear in mind that Virtua Tennis is probably the most celebrated and beloved tennis series ever made.

SEGA’s fast-paced take on smacking a ball over a net was a huge hit in arcades and on home consoles, becoming one of the best multiplayer games you could find on the Dreamcast with its first two games. SEGA’s home console dreams might not have lasted longer than that, but the Virtua Tennis series managed to make the transition to other platforms, with World Tour coming to the PSP in 2004 before the next mainline entry, Virtua Tennis 3, which came to PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 in 2007.

The series would continue, with SEGA releasing an updated version of Virtua Tennis 3, titled Virtua Tennis 2009, before finally releasing a dedicated follow-up game, Virtua Tennis 4, in 2011. The problem is that these two entries received a considerably more muted critical reception compared to other games in the series, with both Virtua Tennis 2009 and Virtua Tennis 4 hovering around the 70 mark on Metacritic.

Exact sales figures are unknown, but considering there’s been no mainline Virtua Tennis game since, it seems like weak reviews and potentially poor sales ensured the death of the series.

The last game was 2012’s Virtua Tennis Challenge for mobile, which is essentially just the core Virtua Tennis experience, complete with World Tour and minigames, only condensed into a mobile game.

 

Wipeout

Anything that can be said about Ridge Racer can also be applied to Wipeout too. This futuristic racer was not only one of Sony’s various golden geese during the PS1 era, it was also an answer to Nintendo’s own F-Zero franchise.

Developed by the lovely lads at Psygnosis, the first Wipeout launched on PS1 to pretty much universal critical acclaim, and both Sony and Psygnosis didn’t look back. Between 1995 and 2008, Psygnosis would release seven mainline Wipeout games, changing their name to Sony Studio Liverpool in the process, along with Wipeout HD in 2008, an upgraded port of PSP releases Wipeout Pure and Pulse.

So why did they get wiped out? It’s not entirely clear, but probably decreasing sales.

Studio Liverpool took a four year break only to return in early 2012 with Wipeout 2048 as a launch game for the PlayStation Vita, and although the reviews were pretty good, Sony would shut down Studio Liverpool a mere six months later, stating that they’d rather focus on other studios working on exciting projects.

Despite cutting Studio Liverpool, Sony still trotted out the Wipeout name for the Omega Collection in 2017, which upgraded Wipeout HD and 2048 for the PS4. Pretty neat collection.

But the series would finally crash into the unexpected wall from around the corner of life with Wipeout Merge in 2021, a racing manager-esque mobile game that used tracks from Wipeout Pulse. It didn’t have any real racing in it. Clearly, it was a huge success, as it’s been delisted from mobile game stores entirely.

 

XCOM

Originally developed by Mythos Games and MicroProse, the original XCOM series of strategy games became one of the most influential series in the entire genre. But after Hasbro and Infogrames got their hands on the series, it kind of just petered away after two unrelated games, First Alien Invasion and Enforcer.

It’d take over a decade for the XCOM series to make a comeback, aided by Firaxis Games and 2K, but what a comeback it was. XCOM: Enemy Unknown was a critical and commercial juggernaut, setting a gold standard in tactical strategy games that many developers would try and fail to emulate in the years since.

The post-Enemy Unknown life for XCOM hasn’t been smooth sailing though. Third person tactical shooter The Bureau: XCOM Declassified failed to capture the same success that Enemy Unknown did. But 2K pressed on with Enemy Within, a standalone expansion, followed by the actual sequel, XCOM 2. That game was a bit too micro-managey and time limity for me, but it did end up being quite the success. Those recent mixed reviews are for the spyware stuff 2K patched in. Which is kinda…ironic for XCOM.

For some reason though Firaxis and 2K didn’t really strike with the iron was hot, launching a middling PC-only follow-up called Chimera Squad in 2020.

That was followed by the now delisted XCOM: Legends for mobile devices. Instead of being a tactical RPG with permadeath mechanics, XCOM: Legends turned a once great series into a bloody gacha game. Legends managed to hang around for just under three years, but like most other mobile games designed to just make money, it disappeared when it stopped being useful, or the credit cards for the whales started declining.

Compound that with the fact that one of the lead developers on this modern XCOM series, Jake Solomon, has left Firaxis entirely after Midnight Suns undeservedly bombed, and there’s a feeling that even if XCOM does come back, the magic just isn’t going to be there.

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