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.
Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus. They had something going with New Order and Old Blood, but then 2016 happened. Their marketing team decided to use current political commentary i.e. Punch a Nazi to ADVERTISE their fucking game, they made complete caricatures of the cast instead of actual compelling characters, and the gameplay itself was poorly thought out.
People may say Youngblood killed the franchise, but IMO it was just the final nail in the coffin.
New Order was ridiculous bullshit to begin with. The anti-White hatred was pretty blatant in that one
Was New Order the first reboot? I played it and found the gameplay good, but there was one part in particular that was hilariously stupid. As you may recall, the premise is that the Nazis won by using incredibly advanced technology, but of course, in current year, no sort of intelligence or competence can be ascribed to them.
Thus, about halfway through the game, it’s revealed that actually, all this technology was stolen from a Jewish secret society that then spent the rest of the war dithering about whether to level the playing field by giving any of this tech to the Allies, until it was too late.
See? We totally owned the Nazi chuds! The Jews were smarter than them this whole time. Please don’t think about what this story would imply about the Jews and their secret global society dedicated to hoarding their utopian technology.
That's the one.
I don't even care about the Jewish angle. It still has really blatant diversity casting. Your primary NPC/allies are:
There's a scene where a masked black guy called 'J' (obviously a stand in for Jimi Hendrix) sacrifices himself so the main character can get away. It is pure and utter cringe, black savior bullshit dialed to 11.
The game is also glorifying anti-White violence & hatred in it that should be off-putting for any normal person.
For example (IIRC) the game has a B-plot villain Frau Engel, who is a stereotypical German mad-scientist with blonde hair, blue eyes, and (ironically given PC messaging) is a sexual degenerate.
There's a sequence in the game where the protagonist basically rips half the woman's face off in a series of quicktime-events, just so the game can purposefully show the face of a German woman being progressively destroyed & mutilated by the main character. It's grotesque and uncalled for, the type of thing that would be completely off-limits to do for any ethnic group except Whites.
It's a Nazi game, and it's core conceit is basically cartoonish super soldier guy doing super soldier things to stop the Nazis. Fine. I'm not expecting a nuanced or informed political take in a shooter game about shooting guys. There's tasteful ways to do that, and there's just sick glorification of violence for the sake of it. The game leans hard into the latter and you can see that with how the 2nd and 3rd game played out. Same trajectory, just a few years on.