Nowadays, the game industry delivers nothing but bad news after bad news. Since 2022,the number of industry layoffs and game cancellations has been alarmingly massive, and it’s a true travesty and a dark side to this business. 2025 is no different. Studios have been closing left and right, and more and more games have been canceled after many long years in development.
Every year, we all eagerly wait for new game announcements at events like Summer Game Fest and The Game Awards, only to wait many more years for those games to be released, or then suddenly get hit with a sad cancellation of that title you were ready to play. Below is every video game cancellation announced in 2025 thus far.
1Transformers: Reactivate
A new Transformers game almost happened from developer Splash Damage, which previously developed Gears Tactics and helped with the multiplayer aspect of Gears of War 4 and Gears 5. The trailer premiered at the 2022 Game Awards, and there’s still some gameplay footage shared on YouTube, but that’s about all you’ll get to see of it.
The cinematic trailer showed the Decepticons making their touchdown on Earth and a team of soldiers fixing up an Autobot Transformer from a first-person point of view, with a rendition of Bon Jovi’s ‘Dead or Alive’ playing in the background. The cinematic showed promise and got you excited for what would’ve been a fun new multiplayer Transformers experience.
Here isthe statement from Splash Damageregarding the cancellation of Transformers: Reactivate.
2Dreamsettler
You may or may not have known that this game was in the works, but it is now indeed canceled. Dreamsettler would’ve been the sequel to Hypnospace Outlaw, and it received a reveal trailer in 2022, showcasing mainly the same interface and mechanics as what you had in the original game.
Hypnospace Outlaw isa psychedelic gamewhere you patrol the internet space and get lost in some incredibly fun and trippy internet rabbit holes. It sounded like Dreamsettler would’ve introduced more 3D components based on the footage, but now we’ll never get to see what it could’ve offered.
The developer, Jay Tholen,issued a personal statement on the game’s cancellation on YouTube.
3Football Manager 25
Unlike EA’s FIFA series (or what’s now the FC series due to licensing), Sports Interactive’s Football Manager is more about the team management and simulation component of the sport. Football Manager 25 would’ve been more of the same as its predecessor, but perhaps its cancellation is not the biggest lossfor soccer game fans, as you now also have Sloclap’s Rematch and EA’s FC 26 in 2025.
After it underwent multiple delays,Sports Interactive finally issued a statementcanceling the game, in which it claims, “Whilst many areas of the game have hit our targets, the overarching player experience and interface is not where we need it to be.” But this cancellation doesn’t mean the end of Football Manager, as the studio also stated that “Our full focus now returns to creating a new era for Football Manager.”
4Live-Service Titles From Sony’s Bend And Bluepoint Games
This cancellation should come as no surprise. After the disastrous launch and quick death of PlayStation’s live-service title, Concord (which would get resurrected for one last time ina Prime Video Secret Level episode), Sony canceled two live-service games from Bend and Bluepoint Games, the latter of which was creating a God of War live-service title. And recall that Naughty Dog had to cancel its live-service Last of Us spin-off title.
Bend is, of course, the studio responsible for the zombie game Days Gone, a single-player game starring Sam Witwer as biker Deacon St. John taking on hordes of Freakers.Bluepoint Games has done phenomenal remakes and remasterslike Demon’s Souls, Shadow of the Colossus, the God of War Collection, and Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection. Probably a good move to allow them to move on from live-service.
5ZeniMax’s MMORPG Code-named Blackbird
ZeniMax Online Studios is largely responsible forthe MMORPG The Elder Scrolls Online, which it continues to support with new updates and features in 2025. You’d think with all the success ZeniMax has had with The Elder Scrolls Online that its next MMORPG project would be safe, but that sadly wasn’t the case.
This project was given the codename ‘Blackbird’ andwas in development for seven years until its cancellation, a decision made by Microsoft amid a wave of cancellations and mass layoffs across its gaming division. Blackbird was apparently a shift from fantasy to a sci-fi MMORPG and would’ve been in good hands had its fate not been sealed.
6Two Unannounced Games From Techland - Project Cornerstone
Techland is a studio largely known for its Dying Light series and is also the developer behind Dead Island and Call of Juarez.First-person zombie horrorwith tons of gore and action-adventure with parkour systems are its specialty, but sadly, things haven’t been so great for the studio. Dying Light: The Beast is still on for 2025, but what comes next is very uncertain.
Techland decided to cancel two video game projects, citing major financial losses in 2023 and 2024.According to Insider Gaming Network, one of those games was supposedly a fantasy RPG, which even had some concept art in 2022. The article states, “The game was internally known as Project Cornerstone and took heavy inspiration from the Star Wars universe.” Quite a different route from zombies.
7Respawn’s New Titanfall Game (Code-named R7)
Like Microsoft and Xbox, EA delivered some of the most cancellations of 2025. We’ll get to the heavier loss down the line, but first, if you didn’t already know, the next Titanfall game from Respawn (codename R7) is no more. If you’re like me and believe that Titanfall 2 remainsone of the most underrated games of all timeand were hoping for more, well, that has now been crushed by EA.
Respawn has shifted focus to its storytelling efforts for the third installment of the Jedi: Fallen Order series, following up on the conclusion of 2023’s Jedi: Survivor. In addition to that major blow, the separate Star Wars FPS game that Respawn has been working on has also been nipped in the bud as of 2024 and will not be launching.
8Battle Aces
Battle Aces is one of the more mind-boggling cancellations. This debut RTS sci-fi game from Uncapped Games was destined to launch in 2025 as free-to-play, and if you look at itsSteam page, there are already positive reviews from outlets like Rolling Stone, PC Gamer, and VG247. Rolling Stone was literally quoted as saying: “A game whose simplicity belies its elegance.” That alone is quite a statement. So, where is it? What happened?
The game went into beta testing in April 2025, andaccording to the statement released by Uncapped Games, the player feedback wasn’t to the developers' liking. Therefore, Battle Aces was abruptly canceled despite it feeling like one of the most complete games here. Sorry, RTS fans who were interested; guess you have to stick with Stronghold Crusader, or revisit Homeworld.
9Earthblade
It’s not extremely OK for Extremely OK Games at the moment, as the developer behind the groundbreaking PICO-8 platformer Celeste has announced the cancellation of its highly anticipated game Earthblade. Earthblade would’ve been a narrative-driven 2D platformer with RPG and Metroidvania elements and in the same pixel art style as Celeste. The UI and gameplay images onEarthblade’s Steam pagelook incredible.
While it seemed like Earthblade was nearing its completion, developerExtremely OK Games published a final updatethat it “was not as far along as one would expect.” The bigger issue had to do with one of the team’s founding members (who was also the pixel and UI artist for Earthblade and previously Celeste) exiting the project due to “a disagreement about the IP rights of Celeste.” Truly heartbreaking.
10Hytale
Hytale will now have to high-tail it on out of the gaming scene, as it was another project that met the sad fate of cancellation in 2025. This game was now in development for ten years before being canceled in June 2025. The dev team on this one was Hypixel Studios, which made the multiplayer Minecraft server Hypixel and used that as the inspiration for this full-fledged IP.
Hytale would’ve been published by Riot Games, precisely the company behind League of Legends and Valorant, and it even acquired Hypixel Studios during the development process. On May 13, 2025,Hytale got its first announcement trailer, which now stands at over 60 million views. And the gameplay and visuals look exactly like a Minecraft clone, aside from a few biome differences and the enemy combat and design.
