How many games behind *Eiyuden Chronicle* died before they were even born?

When a freelance developer wrote, “Since becoming a freelancer, the three main projects I’ve worked on were all canceled midway,” this piece of industry news suddenly stopped being just a cold market fluctuation. It became more like a film that had its funding pulled before shooting even began, without even enough time to leave behind end credits. A recent post in Japan about game projects that “just vanish out of nowhere” sparked heated discussion. What truly stings is not the failure of the projects themselves, but the fact that the people who had already poured themselves into them are ultimately left without even a visible trace of that failure.

From a narrative perspective, what players usually see are only two endings: “launch” and “shutdown.” The large number of projects that die along the way are like strips of film cut from the reel, never entering the public eye. The article notes that competition in today’s game market is becoming increasingly intense. A growing number of games does not mean equal opportunity; instead, it means more works losing the ability to breathe in an overcrowded lane. PCGamer statistics show that among the more than 19,000 games on Steam, nearly half fail to receive even 10 reviews. And an even quieter group consists of projects that never make it to market at all due to development issues, budget constraints, or competitive pressure.

From another angle, a canceled project may be merely a financial loss on the balance sheet for a major company, but for freelancers, it is more like having several pages suddenly torn out of their résumé. This is especially true for young illustrators. Character design often requires compressing one’s aesthetic sense, time, and emotions entirely into a single project. Once that project is canceled, not only can years of hard work never be shown publicly, but their portfolio is left with gaps that are hard to explain. Unfortunately, the industry’s evaluation system happens to rely heavily on “what you have done,” rather than “what you nearly accomplished.”

Danryoku, an artist who worked on monster design for Eiyuden Chronicle, is relatively “fortunate” among people in this kind of situation. He has been in the industry for 14 years, worked on 6 mobile games, and also taken part in 3 canceled projects; the former have all now shut down, while the latter consumed about 5 and a half years in total. A creator can pour more than a decade of professional life into the machinery of the industry, only to be left with so little that can reliably endure. That fact itself is closer to reality than any piece of feel-good industry rhetoric. He even said that he still counts as lucky, because some people spend ten years on projects and end up with nothing at all.

But the deeper problem is that today’s game industry increasingly resembles the production of high-cost, long-cycle TV dramas: platforms chase traffic, teams gamble on timing, while freelancers are often the ones bearing the kind of time risk that is hardest to compensate. Player communities often lament games that shut down, but projects that never even make it to release are not granted the right to be remembered. Judging from the trend, this situation is unlikely to ease anytime soon: more projects, denser competition, and lower tolerance for error mean that the number of “disappearing works” will continue to grow.

So what deserves to be seen most in this discussion is not that a particular project is gone, but that the industry is pushing more and more creators into a predicament where “the work truly happened, yet cannot be proven.” Games may of course still be sold as commodities, but at the level closer to people, they should first and foremost be places where creators leave their mark. If even those traces cannot be preserved, then this so-called prosperity inevitably feels somewhat hollow.