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.
Digimon Survive managed to likely burn off most of the steam the franchise had built from Cyber Sluts (especially its PC release). Which further kills any chance of us getting a followup to Digimon World 2 once again.
Its one thing to delay a game by like two years. Its another to market it heavily on the strategy game portions, only for it to release and be almost entirely a VN where the strategy game portions feel painfully tacked on just to pretend it isn't a VN. Doesn't even matter if the story was very good when VNs are a very special type of genre that even fans of it need a proper mood to play.
Also in a more roundabout way Midnight Suns managed to kill XCOM in a real tragic way.
Its one of the best deckbuilder/card battler games out there, mostly by virtue of not being a fucking roguelike, but came out way too late in the Marvel popularity to gain any traction and put Niko, the most insufferable and ugly thing I've ever seen, as one of the first characters you get. And it managed to combine that card battler system well with the strategic portions left over from XCOM where positioning becomes incredibly important and a properly built team can just dance around enemies that should dab on them. Heck the fact that they managed to make every Hero's deck be built around their characterization is wild.
And since its Firaxis its so easily moddable you can just remove or trivialize the parts you don't like, for those who hate the socialization aspect or some of the costumes.
But it failed hard enough that Jake Solomon was forced to resign, as was the CEO who was replaced by a woman, which kills nu-Firaxis pretty dead and leaves the Terror From the Deep hook from XCOM2 likely never resolved.
I don't know for sure, but isn't it already skipped over in the timeline for XCOM given that police squad game was released after?
Chimera was dropped with minimal fanfare for 10$ on release. It felt more like a wacky spinoff game made with spare time instead of something proper. I think they even said it was non-canonical at the time.
Considering how poorly balanced it is and how many new ideas it just haphazardly through into the game, it very much comes across as a testing ground type game for "hero units" and "RPG progression" that other games in its genre use (like Fire Emblem) being mixed with XCOM.
Wait, Midnight Suns was a deckbuilder? I never paid much attention to it, I thought it was just an XCOM-like.
You can feel XCOM influence in the combat, but yeah its fully a deckbuilder. No cover, no miss RNG, power dyanmics flipped so that you are the absurdly powerful one being taken down by half a dozen humans.
But it still suffers the the problem XCOM2 does, in that Jake Solomon fucking hates patience. So every fight is built to punish you for not going full speed at all times, which means the defensive characters and the one "random effect" one is completely useless because you don't get the chance to set up or deal with inconsistency. Overwatch move from XCOM1 truly mindbroke the man.
Though for what its worth, it being a deckbuilder but not a roguelike is very different feel that what the word usually evokes. Being able to just pick your cards as permanent skills you build around is very different than Slay the Spire type. Its actually the 8 card limit that effects you more than the cards you have.
That actually sounds really interesting. Not interesting enough for me to want to buy a Marvel product in Current Year (+/- however you want), but interesting.
I only even considered it because the "all DLC legendary edition" is constantly on sale for like 17$ after only a year, likely because the flop was that bad. And I got like 60 hours after a single run off that price so it ended up being a great deal.
And as someone who doesn't really like Marvel outside Spiderman and a few niche storylines, its less MCU centric than expected and actually treats most of the characters with the respect the comics haven't in decades. Even the annoying ones you can just shit talk to your heart's content about how stupid they are, a benefit to its social system.