‘Dead game’ is a term thrown around loosely now. You’ll often hear players say it whenever a game drops a few spots in the Steam concurrent players chart, gets a bad balance update, or makes a change that angers the community. But that’s not what actually makes a game dead.

Dead games usually disappear twice. First when the players leave, and then again when people stop talking about them. The games on this list never really managed the second part.

Not all of these games are “dead” in the exact same way. Some are officially gone. Some are technically still playable but functionally abandoned. Some survive through tiny, stubborn communities that refuse to let go. But with the momentum gone and their future in question, all you’re left with is a strong sense of what could have been. And yet, I still miss them all.

Anthem

What was it about?

Anthem had one of the coolest core fantasies I have ever seen wasted. Flying around in a Javelin felt incredible. The movement had speed, weight, and that rare kind of freedom that instantly made you think, “Okay, this is the fantasy.”

Even now, when people talk about Anthem, that is usually the first thing they bring up. Not the loot. Not the missions. The flying.

Why did it fail?

Because everything around the power fantasy could not support it, Anthem’s trailer had many wondering if it was a narrative-driven story game, but it was released as a live-service game that never really understood the kind of game it wanted to be. The content loop was weak, the gameplay got repetitive fast, and the game never found the long-term support it needed to build on its best idea. Anthem is easy to remember because the foundation is so cool. Though it is a painful reminder that a concept alone is never enough.

Deceive Inc.

What was it about?

In a sea full of multiplayer shooters, Deceive Inc. felt genuinely fresh in a market that rarely rewards experimentation. The whole spy-social-stealth concept was clever, stylish, and different in a way that made it stand out immediately. It was a game with an actual personality instead of the usual formula that revolved around battle royales and hero shooters.

Why did it fail?

Players being clever isn’t always enough to survive. Deceive Inc. never felt like it found the player base it deserved. For multiplayer games, a bit of momentum and a dedicated community are what make it thrive. So once you lose both, recovery gets brutally hard. It also lived in that awkward space where people that played it often seemed to love the idea, but not enough people showed up to keep that idea alive. “How did it never catch on?” is the question we’ve been left with.

Gigantic

What was it about?

Gigantic was one of the best ‘Hero Shooters’ out there. It had style and substance. It looked alive in a way a lot of team-based multiplayer games never do. The art direction, character design, and scale of the matches were all expressive and full of energy. Apart from my uncontested favorite in the genre, this came as a close second. Even the remaster reminds people how distinct the game’s identity really was.

Why did it fail?

Timing, support, and bad luck all seemed to work against it. Gigantic always came across as the game people admired, but from a distance. That is the cruel thing about games like this. A game can be original, stylish, and easy to root for, and the market can still shrug it off. Unfortunately, the Gigantic: Rampage Edition was a relaunch that aimed to bring back the interest, but people had already moved on, and as my friend once put it, “the spark is just not there anymore.”

Titanfall 2

What was it about?

Titanfall 2 is a game that still feels better than half the shooters that came after it. Even as gamers were complaining about the shifting focus of Call of Duty into a movement shooter, the fatigue of this meta helped create a game that leaned heavily into this. A game with in-depth movement mechanics and style. The movement was fast and fluid, the Titans added real spectacle, and the campaign had one of the best level designs of its era. To date, it feels like a game that people bring up with a mix of admiration and frustration since it got so much right.

Why did it fail?

While its story is a bit similar to the rest of the games on this list, the issues were more nuanced here. Respawn Entertainment released the game between two colossal video game franchise releases, which overshadowed it on launch. Its gruelling mechanics had many of the casual players quit in favor of simpler titles. What made matters worse was that the game was held hostage for years by hackers. There was no support from the studio, which shifted most of its focus to its real money-maker, Apex Legends.

Paladins: Champions of the Realm

Paladins is different from other games on this because I did not just admire it from a distance. I lived in it. I put nearly 3,000 hours into that game, hit the top ranks, and spent enough time with it to see both its brilliance and its mess up close. What made Paladins special was that it always felt more flexible, more chaotic, and honestly, more creative than people gave it credit for.

The champions had personality, the card and loadout system let you shape your playstyle in ways other hero shooters did not. The whole thing had scrappy energy that made it feel alive even when it was barely being held together. This game is also the reason I decided to make this list of all the great games we’ve lost.

Why did it fail?

Paladins was never allowed to be as great as it could have been. It was plagued by bugs, weird balancing, uneven support, and the constant uphill battle of living in the shadows of Overwatch. But what hurts that most is that Paladins did not die because nobody cared; it faded while people still cared. The small but strong community held out as Hi-Rez suffered from severe mismanagement. Over time, the controversial changes, lack of support, and bugs forced many players to quit.

(Shout out to GreatDivide for the Cassie clip.)

The game still gets around 2000 players on a good day, with the community supporting it and carrying it longer than most dead games ever get carried. All of these games stay with me for different reasons. Some were wasted potential. Some were mistimed. Some just never found enough people.

A dead game does not stay in your head this long, unless it got something very right.

A new report dubbed “BrowserGate” warns that Microsoft’s LinkedIn is using hidden JavaScript scripts on its website to scan visitors’ browsers for installed extensions and collect device data.

According to a report by Fairlinked e.V., which claims to be an association of commercial LinkedIn users, Microsoft’s platform injects JavaScript into user sessions that checks for thousands of browser extensions and links the results to identifiable user profiles.

The author claims that this behavior is used to collect sensitive personal and corporate information, as LinkedIn accounts are tied to real identities, employers, and job roles.

“LinkedIn scans for over 200 products that directly compete with its own sales tools, including Apollo, Lusha, and ZoomInfo. Because LinkedIn knows each user’s employer, it can map which companies use which competitor products. It is extracting the customer lists of thousands of software companies from their users’ browsers without anyone’s knowledge,’ the report says.

“Then it uses what it finds. LinkedIn has already sent enforcement threats to users of third-party tools, using data obtained through this covert scanning to identify its targets.”

BleepingComputer has independently confirmed part of these claims through our own testing, during which we observed a JavaScript file with a randomized filename being loaded by LinkedIn’s website.

This script checked for 6,236 browser extensions by attempting to access file resources associated with a specific extension ID, a known technique for detecting whether extensions are installed.

This fingerprinting script was previously reported in 2025, but it was only detecting approximately 2,000 extensions at that time. A different GitHub repository from two months ago shows 3,000 extensions being detected, demonstrating that the number of detected extensions continues to grow.

While many of the extensions that are scanned for are related to LinkedIn, the script also strangely detected language and grammar extensions, tools for tax professionals, and other seemingly unrelated features.

The script also collects a wide range of browser and device data, including CPU core count, available memory, screen resolution, timezone, language settings, battery status, audio information, and storage features.

BleepingComputer could not verify the claims in the BrowserGate report about the use of the data or whether it is shared with third-party companies.

However, similar fingerprinting techniques have been used in the past to build unique browser profiles, which can enable tracking users across websites.

LinkedIn denies data use allegations

LinkedIn does not dispute that it detects specific browser extensions, telling BleepingComputer that the info is used to protect the platform and its users.

However, the company claims the report is from someone whose account was banned for scraping LinkedIn content and violating the site’s terms of use.

LinkedIn claims the BrowserGate report stems from a dispute involving the developer of a LinkedIn-related browser extension called “Teamfluence,” which LinkedIn says it restricted for violating the platform’s terms.

In documents shared with BleepingComputer, a German court denied the developer’s request for a preliminary injunction, finding that LinkedIn’s actions did not constitute unlawful obstruction or discrimination.

The court also found that automated data collection alone could infringe upon LinkedIn’s terms of use and that it was entitled to block the accounts to protect its platform.

LinkedIn argues the BrowserGate report is an attempt to re-litigate that dispute publicly.

Regardless of the reasons for the report, one point is undisputed.

LinkedIn’s site uses a fingerprinting script that detects over 6,000 extensions running in a Chromium browser, along with other data about a visitor’s system.

This is not the first time that companies have used aggressive fingerprinting scripts to detect programs running on a visitor’s device.

In 2021, eBay was found to use JavaScript to perform automated port scans on visitors’ devices to determine whether they were running various remote support software.

While eBay never confirmed why they were using these scripts, it was widely believed that they were used to block fraud on compromised devices.

It was later discovered that numerous other companies were using the same fingerprinting script, including Citibank, TD Bank, Ameriprise, Chick-fil-A, Lendup, BeachBody, Equifax IQ connect, TIAA-CREF, Sky, GumTree, and WePay.

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Device code phishing attacks that abuse the OAuth 2.0 Device Authorization Grant flow to hijack accounts have surged more than 37 times this year.

In this type of attack, the threat actor sends a device authorization request to a service provider and receives a code, which is sent to the victim under various pretexts.

Next, the victim is tricked into entering the code on the legitimate login page, thus authorizing the attacker’s device to access the account through valid access and refresh tokens.

This flow was designed to simplify connecting devices that do not have accessible input options (e.g., IoT devices, printers, streaming devices, and smart TVs).

The device code phishing technique was first documented in 2020, but malicious exploitation was recorded a few years later, and has been used by both state-hackers and financially-motivated ones [1, 2, 3, 4].

Researchers at Push Security observed a massive increase in the use of these attacks, warning that they have been widely adopted by cybercriminals.

Earlier this week, threat detection and response company Sekoia published research on the EvilTokens phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) operation. The researchers underline that it is a prominent example of a phishing kit that “democratizes” device code phishing, making it available to low-skilled cybercriminals.

Push agrees that EvilTokens has been a major driver of the technique’s mainstream adoption, but notes that there are several other platforms competing on the same market, which could become more prominent in the event of law enforcement disrupting EvilTokens:

1. VENOM – A closed-source PhaaS kit offering both device code phishing and AiTM capabilities. Its device code component appears to be an EvilTokens clone.
2. SHAREFILE – A kit themed around Citrix ShareFile document transfers, using node-based backend endpoints to simulate file sharing and trigger device code flows.
3. CLURE – A kit using rotating API endpoints and an anti-bot gate, with SharePoint-themed lures and backend infrastructure on DigitalOcean.
4. LINKID – A kit leveraging Cloudflare challenge pages and self-hosted APIs, using Microsoft Teams and Adobe-themed lures.
5. AUTHOV – A workers.dev-hosted kit using popup-based device code entry and Adobe document-sharing lures.
6. DOCUPOLL – A kit hosted on GitHub Pages and workers.dev that mimics DocuSign workflows, including injected replicas of real pages.
7. FLOW_TOKEN – A workers.dev-hosted kit using Tencent Cloud backend infrastructure, with HR and DocuSign-themed lures and popup-based flows.
8. PAPRIKA – An AWS S3–hosted kit using Microsoft login clone pages with Office 365 branding and a fake Okta footer.
9. DCSTATUS – A minimal kit with generic Microsoft 365 “Secure Access” lures and limited visible infrastructure markers.
10. DOLCE – A Microsoft PowerApps-hosted kit with Dolce & Gabbana–themed lures, likely a one-off or red-team-style implementation rather than widely used.

It should be noted that other than Venom and EvilTokens, the names of the other phishing kits were given by Push researchers to track the malicious activity.

Push Security also published a video showing how the DOCUPOLL kit works. The threat actor uses DocuSign branding and a lure for an alleged contract, asking the victim to sign into the Microsoft Office application.

In total, there are at least 11 phishing kits offering cybercriminals this type of attack, all using realistic SaaS-themed lures, anti-bot protections, and abusing cloud platforms for hosting.

To block device-code phishing attacks, Push Security suggests that users disable the flow when not needed by setting conditional access policies on their accounts.

It is also recommended to monitor logs for unexpected device code authentication events, unusual IP addresses, and sessions.

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This whitepaper maps six validation surfaces, shows where coverage ends, and provides practitioners with three diagnostic questions for any tool evaluation.

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