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.
Mass Effect 3 went to shit with the DLC for Mass Effect 2. It took a game that was supposedly big on choice and forces the player to be where the beginning of Mass Effect 3 wanted them to be. Then there was that awful child character that Shepard inexplicably became obsessed with. They couldn't even get a child capable of acting for that role or the retarded plot device of the "catalyst" later.
There was something hinted at with one of the side quests in Mass Effect 2. I forget exactly what, but there was a fight on a planet with a star that was dying early nearby. Apparently that was supposed to be setting up the plot of 3, but it got leaked and they changed it to the retarded faggotry we got.
It was the planet Tali and her team were researching if memory serves. I read somewhere that the plot would be centred around all of the back and forth travel through the mass relays generating too much dark matter as a byproduct throughout the universe, and causing stars to collapse into black holes or something. This would have been a justification for the reapers’ existence as a necessary evil, ie to cull the galactic races each time they became too advanced so the mass relays could lie dormant for a few thousand years and the dark matter levels would subside.
I think that would’ve been a lot more interesting than the whole, “biologicals vs synthetics” philosophical nonsense they went with in the end.
It was like a ripoff of the Terminator, except Skynet was made to kill everyone on purpose. I don't remember the exact explanation, since I played it years ago. I just remember it being completely retarded.