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, though not quite for the reason most people would say. Yes, yes, the ending sucked and ruined the rest of the trilogy, but it was inevitable that it was going to kill the franchise dead no matter how good or bad it was. Mass Effect was conceived from the beginning to be an epic told across three games where choices made in one would have rippling effects in the others, and the end would always result in a shattered status quo that would affect all civilization across the entire galaxy. Even in the most ideal situation where the project lived up to the hype and ambition (which it didn't even come close to doing), making a sequel to that would be impossible.
Honestly, I always thought the premise behind Mass Effect was flawed from the beginning. Bioware approached the project like they were making an epic film trilogy, when they should have looked at it as an RPG sandbox. Right from the onset, the ME universe had a massive amount of worldbuilding, history, unsolved mysteries, politics rife with intrigue, and plot hooks that could have been used to tell thousands of stories. Instead, they used all that to tell one big one that would change the world state tremendously in so many ways that a continuation wouldn't really be possible. Not without fracturing the fanbase anyway. Though the fact that all the endings were so godawful was the nugget on top of the shit sundae.
That being said, Andromeda definitely drove at least a few nails into the ME coffin. It was obviously meant to be a soft reboot of the franchise, providing a reason to take all the existing alien races and put them in a far-off galaxy away from the original trilogy's nonsense, but its poor reception put the kibosh on that plan. So I guess it would still count.
Funnily enough, it may have also had a hand in killing both Anthem and Dragon Age as well. Or perhaps Anthem killed Mass Effect and Dragon Age. It's hard to say. Anthem siphoned resources off development for DA4 and Andromeda, but Andromeda was such a colossal failure that it put even more pressure an Anthem to reach success numbers it could never achieve. Regardless, Dragon Age is screwed thanks to both fuck-ups.