Just observing the disaster of Suicide Squad game, the calamity of the current Doctor Who and many other franchises along the way, it feels like we are on the eve of a purge in western media where a lot of franchises are going to die or at the very least, be put on a very long hiatus.
In my opinion, a lot of these survive off habit, you get used to enjoying a certain thing, you regularly consume certain thing and never think about it. Until they make something that breaks that habit it won't die so thought I'd list off some of those bits of media that killed off a franchise:
Command and Conquer= C&C4: This one singlehandedly killed the franchise, even before they used it's corpse for a mobile game. The complete removal of bases from the game itself was the dumbest decision ever made, but not the first time EA would remove a core mechanic from a major franchise..
Battlefield: Battlefield 2042: the other example by removing classes for 'operators' in the game probably damaged it more than just how much it was a buggy unplayable mess. It was such a bad decision that they put the classes back in but with talk of the next being a live service and even the return of operators, I can hear the death chimes for this franchise just like honourable mention the Medal of Honour series.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi: it's amazing how this single film started this franchise tanking that was bought for billions and even had people appreciating the prequels more. From the bad writing, stale acting and stupid plot, this killed the enthusiasm for a decades long series.
The potential new ones: AC Shadows and GTA6: these two in the future have the possibility to kill their respective franchises. We are finding more and more on AC that it's looking like every wrong move has been taken and with how lackluster Mirage was received, it ain't looking good. GTA6 however, there's a possibility it'll simply be another Cyberpunk in just not meeting expectations which IS recoverable.
Just thought this was interesting to discuss seeing franchises both established and barely formed (cough Trench Crusade) killing themselves in a single release especially around our current time.
Oddly enough at the other end of the Arkham franchise I thought that decent video games had died.
So there I was having beaten up Bane quite brutally multiple times and the eternal henchmen mob that keeps on coming in while I'm doing so when I finally see that I need to hit a particular button to pull his mask tubes off.
I'd just about got over the whole notifications for discovering things and seeing when a friend came onto Steam and what they were playing but now I'd got a walkthru telling me what to do to progress in the game.
Well that just threw any immersion I had in the game out the window. I would still have been annoyed that I had to figure out a finishing move technique but I would have learned that's what you do at a particular part of a battle and been up for it for future battles. Having an instruction given, along with all the other notifications, just made the whole situation feel artificial.
I still enjoyed the game afterwards but that was when I knew that games weren't what they used to be.
Halo 4 did that, twice. It started with "press f to win" when you pull some random monster down a lift shaft you're climbing in a derelict spaceship, and then ended with "press f to win" by slapping a blue plasma grenade on the big bad after however long you properly fought him.
Yeah I don't know if that was the inflection point but the casual shit definitely started getting worse. The backlash over all the handholding in the recent God of War might have gotten devs to take note though. It was literally "Press F to win".