10 Games That Got Better After a Rough Launch
Updated August 5, 2026
The most extreme recovery in this medium is Final Fantasy XIV. Square Enix took the version it shipped in September 2010, put Naoki Yoshida in charge in December 2010, and relaunched a rebuilt game as A Realm Reborn in August 2013, as TIME documented. Nothing else below involved deleting the product and shipping a different one under the same name. Everything else is a patch story, and for four of these ten the Steam review score cannot prove the turnaround happened.
| Game | Launched | Studio | The update that changed it | Steam all-time | Steam last 30 days |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Final Fantasy XIV | Sep 2010 | Square Enix | A Realm Reborn (Aug 2013) | 86% of 78,239 | 81% of 359 |
| No Man’s Sky | Aug 12, 2016 | Hello Games | Foundation, update 1.1 (Nov 27, 2016) | 83% of 310,876 | 90% of 1,703 |
| Cyberpunk 2077 | Dec 9, 2020 | CD PROJEKT RED | Update 2.0 (Sep 21, 2023) | 87% of 871,327 | 95% of 14,332 |
| Diablo III | May 15, 2012 | Blizzard Entertainment | Patch 2.0.1 and auction house shutdown (2014) | Not on Steam | Not on Steam |
| Sea of Thieves | Mar 20, 2018 | Rare Ltd | Anniversary Update (Apr 30, 2019) | 88% of 321,227 | 83% of 1,323 |
| Destiny 2 | Sep 6, 2017 | Bungie | Forsaken (Sep 2018) | 78% of 660,911 | 81% of 2,659 |
| Rainbow Six Siege | Dec 1, 2015 | Ubisoft Montreal | Siege X (Jun 10, 2025) | 82% of 1,537,981 | 74% of 10,523 |
| Fallout 76 | Nov 14, 2018 | Bethesda Game Studios | Wastelanders (Apr 14, 2020) | 74% of 77,835 | 66% of 510 |
| Battlefield 2042 | Nov 19, 2021 | DICE | Update 3.2.0, classes restored (Jan 2023) | 49% of 259,985 | 62% of 581 |
| Cities: Skylines II | Oct 24, 2023 | Colossal Order, then Iceflake Studios | Developer handover (Jan 2026) | 56% of 63,155 | 75% of 820 |
Studio and both review figures as credited on each game’s Steam store page, checked August 2026. The “launched” column is the original release, which for several of these is earlier than the Steam page date. Diablo III has never been sold on Steam.
How do you tell a rescue from an Early Access build-out?
A rescue has a moment where the shipped product was worse than what buyers were told they were buying, and the repair changed systems people had already paid for. An Early Access build-out is a schedule the buyer agreed to in advance.
Deep Rock Galactic sits at 97% of 302,087 reviews, Baldur’s Gate 3 at 96% of 749,216, Hades II at 95% of 113,168. None was rescued. They grew in public, on purpose, with the score high from early on, which we covered in when Early Access actually works.
Which games actually turned it around?
1. Final Fantasy XIV
The only game here whose fix was to switch the game off and build a different one. The original launched in September 2010 to widespread criticism, Yoshida was made producer and director that December, and A Realm Reborn launched in August 2013, according to TIME. The Steam version did not arrive until 18 February 2014, so Steam has never sold the version that failed.
2. No Man’s Sky
Three months of public silence, ended by an update announced two days before it shipped. In Steam’s announcement feed, Hello Games posts patch notes on 2 September 2016, then nothing until “Foundation Update Incoming” on 25 November and “The Foundation Update is here” on 27 November. The studio later wrote that “the average team size was 6, the final team was just 15 people at launch” in a message dated 23 July 2018. Its release log now reads version 6.45.1.
3. Cyberpunk 2077
The thing that fixed it was free, and it was not the expansion. Update 2.0 shipped on 21 September 2023 with redesigned perks, cyberware tied to character level, vehicle combat and an overhauled police system, and CD PROJEKT RED called it “the biggest free update to Cyberpunk 2077 yet” in its own press release. The paid expansion followed five days later. A detail most people miss on the store page: Valve’s notice of “off-topic review activity”, meaning the 87% already has review-bombing periods filtered out.
4. Diablo III
The repair was deleting a feature, not adding one. Blizzard confirmed a 15 May 2012 release date, as Game Informer reported. Loot 2.0 arrived with patch 2.0.1 in late February 2014, adding class-aware “Smart Drop” loot. Blizzard then shut both auction houses on 18 March 2014, writing that the system “ultimately undermines Diablo’s core game play: kill monsters to get cool loot”.
5. Sea of Thieves
Launched with an ocean and almost nothing to do in it, and the fix took thirteen months. Rare released it worldwide on 20 March 2018. The Anniversary Update landed on 30 April 2019 with Tall Tales: Shores of Gold, nine narrative adventures, plus the Arena mode and the Hunter’s Call fishing company, all free. Its last-30-days score of 83% sits five points below its all-time 88%: a completed turnaround and current enthusiasm are different things.
6. Destiny 2
Bungie has said on stage that the game was roughly five weeks from being shut down. It shipped on 6 September 2017. In the GDC talk “From Box Products to Live Service”, Justin Truman said of February 2018 that at the rate the game was shedding players, “if this continued for just five more weeks, we would run out of players”, as quoted in coverage of the talk. Forsaken reversed it, but the same report found daily counts back below that 2018 low by October 2025.
7. Rainbow Six Siege
It recovered, then slid again, and the Steam numbers currently show the slide. Ubisoft Montreal released it on 1 December 2015 into a widely criticised technical state. Siege X launched on 10 June 2025 with an audio overhaul, modernised maps, a 6v6 Dual Front mode and a free tier, per Ubisoft’s own post. Its all-time 82% spans the largest sample here, over 1.5 million reviews. Its last 30 days is 74%.
8. Fallout 76
Its Steam score is not evidence of a recovery, because Steam only ever sold the repaired version. Bethesda launched it on 14 November 2018, seventeen months before the game reached Steam at all. Its later announcement says Wastelanders arrived free on 14 April 2020 with “fully voiced NPCs”, a new main questline and a reputation system, and in the same post: “When Wastelanders launches on April 14, Fallout 76 will also make its way onto Steam”, the identical date. No launch-week review from 2018 exists on the Steam page.
9. Battlefield 2042
The fix was DICE conceding the launch design was wrong and putting the previous one back. It released on 19 November 2021 built around Specialists instead of Battlefield’s traditional classes. In the game’s Steam feed, “Dev Notes - Return to the Class System” appears on 19 January 2023 and the Update 3.2.0 notes on 27 January. It moved the needle nowhere near far enough: 49% all-time against 62% over the last 30 days, on only 581 recent reviews.
10. Cities: Skylines II
The turnaround still in progress, and the only one where the publisher replaced the developer. Released on 24 October 2023 with serious performance problems, it spent two years near the 50% mark. On 17 November 2025 Paradox announced that it and Colossal Order had “mutually decided to pursue independent paths” and that Iceflake Studios “will take over all existing and future development” from the start of 2026, in its own post. By July 2026, Forbes reported 74% positive across 951 reviews from the previous month.
Why can’t Steam’s score prove four of these turnarounds?
Because four of the ten had no Steam page when they launched. Final Fantasy XIV reached Steam on 18 February 2014, Sea of Thieves on 3 June 2020, Destiny 2 on 1 October 2019, and Fallout 76 on 14 April 2020, which Bethesda confirms was the same day Wastelanders shipped. Every date falls after the repair, so those pages rate the fixed game from day one and “look, it is Very Positive now” proves nothing.
Where Steam does hold the whole history, compare all-time against the last 30 days: No Man’s Sky reads 83% and 90%, Cyberpunk 2077 87% and 95%, Cities: Skylines II 56% and 75%. Those gaps are the measurable signal, and they are why we keep telling people to read the recent column, not the headline.
How much did No Man’s Sky’s player count actually fall?
There is no single correct answer, and the confident number you have seen repeated has no primary source.
Shacknews reported on 24 August 2016 that concurrent players had “plummeted by 89 percent, to just shy of 23,000” from over 212,000 at launch. SegmentNext reported on 16 September 2016 that the drop was 98%, from a peak of 212,321 to around 1,000, and said plainly that “the statistics come from the SteamCharts and SteamSpy websites”. They disagree by nine points because they measured different windows using third-party scrapes of Steam’s public counter. Neither Hello Games nor Valve has published a retention figure, so we are not printing one.
Which rough launches never got rescued?
Elite Dangerous: Odyssey, released by Frontier Developments on 19 May 2021, sits at 42% of 7,848 reviews five years later, against 76% of 81,947 for the base game. Every entry above is a survivor, and you cannot read the base rate for “shipped broken, later fixed” off ten cases where it worked. That is the same trap as studying only success stories to understand why games fail on Steam.
What do the completed turnarounds have in common?
The repair was free and applied to the base game: Update 2.0, Wastelanders, Foundation and the Anniversary Update all went to existing owners at no cost, and Cyberpunk’s paid expansion arrived five days after the free fix and did not carry it. The repair often removed something, as when Blizzard deleted the auction house and DICE deleted Specialists as a standalone system. And most of them took years, with No Man’s Sky’s Foundation Update, three months after launch, the one quick exception.
Where does Grandma Left Me a Building sit in this?
Nowhere yet. Grandma Left Me a Building is unreleased: no Steam reviews, no players, no launch to have gone badly, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
We can say which failure modes here our design avoids. There is no time pressure, so there is no difficulty tuning crisis of the kind Diablo III patched out with Loot 2.0. The trait-based interaction system carries 300+ distinct character interactions across 30+ tenants and feeds a happiness-driven income system, so most of what could go wrong lives in the numbers. If the philosophy-lecturing yeti sours every floor he lands on, we retune him and ship. And the art is hand-drawn cartoon work, with nothing simulating at city scale, so the Cities: Skylines II performance trap is not the one waiting for us. None of it means anything until players get their hands on it. The one thing this research changed for us is duller than a design principle: build the update path before launch, while nothing is on fire. More is in how we designed Grandma Left Me a Building.
Frequently asked questions
Is No Man’s Sky the biggest turnaround in gaming?
By volume of free updates it is a strong candidate, with its release log at version 6.45.1 ten years after launch. By severity of the failure, Final Fantasy XIV is larger: Square Enix replaced the leadership, ended the shipped game and relaunched a rebuilt one. One is the most sustained recovery, the other the most extreme.
Does a game’s Steam score go up when it gets fixed?
Only the recent window moves quickly. The all-time figure is a running total across every review the page has ever received, so years of launch anger keep weighing on it. That is why Cities: Skylines II can show 56% overall and 75% for the last month at once.
Do these recoveries last?
Not automatically. Rainbow Six Siege recovered and is now rated lower over the last 30 days than across its whole history, and Fallout 76 shows the same pattern. Destiny 2 was reported in October 2025 to be below the player count that nearly ended it in 2018.
Should I wait a year before buying a game with a rough launch?
Waiting costs nothing and the review data improves with time. Check whether the announced fixes are free updates to the base game or a paid expansion, because every game here that recovered repaired what people already owned.
Key takeaways
- Final Fantasy XIV is the extreme case. Square Enix ended the shipped game and relaunched a rebuilt one, at a scale no other major studio has repeated.
- Steam cannot prove four of these ten turnarounds. Final Fantasy XIV, Sea of Thieves, Destiny 2 and Fallout 76 all reached Steam after their repairs, so their pages never held the backlash.
- The quoted No Man’s Sky player drop has no primary source. Reports gave 89% and 98% within three weeks of each other, both from third-party scrapes.
- Removing a system beat adding content. Blizzard’s auction house shutdown and DICE’s return to classes were deletions, and both moved further than the content drops before them.
- Recoveries expire. Rainbow Six Siege and Fallout 76 both rate lower over the last 30 days than across their whole history, and Destiny 2’s daily player count was reported below its 2018 low.
Grandma Left Me a Building has no launch story to tell yet, and you can wishlist it on Steam to see how the first one goes.
