Franchise Killer/Video Games

Examples of this trope in video games

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Midway Games

• Gauntlet (1985 video game) was a fairly decent hack-and-slash arcade-style adventure series, until Seven Sorrows came along. It was an Obvious Beta, with a lot of old standby techniques gone (like not being able to shoot potions), and none of the "new features" touted for the game anywhere. Any plans for the franchise after that were effectively shelved. 2014 saw "Slayer Edition" outsourced to a third party studio, which met decent reviews, but lukewarm sales. The original game is however recreated in Lego Dimensions, but it hasn't made appearances since then.
• Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run was intended to be a tie-in to a cancelled movie. Needless to say, the game flopped belly up, sinking the franchise altogether.
• LA Rush was billed as a Spiritual Successor to San Francisco Rush, but ended up as just another average street racer.
• Blacksite: Area 51 is an interesting chicken-or-the-egg case. While the game was so atrociously bad that it ensured no future Area 51 games would be made, the game's Obvious Beta glitches and other over signs of poor quality were an indication that Midway Games was already on the brink of collapse. Sure enough, the entire company folded soon after the game's release. To paraphrase Word of God: "This project was so fucked up. I just wasn't excited about this Area 51 game." The IP has yet to be touched since.
• Mortal Kombat Vs. DC Universe and its infamous censorship served as the nail in the coffin for 3D-based Mortal Kombat titles; every game since has been 2.5D, though leaning much more heavily into 3D than other (typically Eastern) 2.5D fighters. The series would have a regular series of guest fighters, but they'd never do a full crossover again.

Capcom

• Thanks to dumbing-down the gameplay, making the beloved Frank West an annoying asshole, doing nothing to build upon the overarching story of the series, dropping the series' iconic and colorful Psychopaths in favor of weaker and more generic boss fights called "maniacs", and removing mixed drinks, Dead Rising 4 sold poorly and likely killed the series for the forseeable future. Capcom Vancouver were demoted to app duty before being shut down shortly after.
• Dino Crisis 3 stretched Willing Suspension of Disbelief beyond all hope of recovery when it put dinosaurs on a spaceship in the future. That's not even getting into the gameplay, which stunk due to the inclusion of anti-gravity without the controls to make it bearable, or the plot, which discarded the running story of the previous games despite the fact that part 2 ended on a cliffhanger!
• Although it wasn't exactly bad, Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter was such an incredible deviation from the rest of the Breath of Fire games (a series that's usually very big on continuity, to boot) that the series came to a screeching halt. Several years and a new console generation later, the series has shown no signs of reawakening. Even when another company offered to buy the license to make a new Breath of Fire game, Capcom refused. Also, a truly bad sixth installment managed to do in the series further.
• Due to poor sales and, more specifically, Executive Meddling, the Darkstalkers series has no foreseeable future. Fingers are typically pointed at Darkstalkers Ressurection, a Vanilla Edition re-release of 2 out of the 3 main games.
• Ditto for Mega Man, once a staple in Capcom's line-up and one of the faces of the company. There's actually quite a few of these among its many series'.
  • Mega Man 8, due to various factors (including widely reviled English voice acting and some poorly devised weapons and items), resulted in the core part of the franchise being left fallow for twelve years. And while the eighth game is still in continuity (deliberate references to it were made in both Mega Man 9 and Mega Man 10), the gameplay and design aesthetic have reverted back to that of the second installment, widely considered the Magnum Opus of the Classic series.
    • Unfortunately, Mega Man 10 did even more harm and re-killed the Classic series for a time, not in the sense that it was a bad game, but one that felt bland compared to others in the series and did little, if anything to innovate. 9 was a fun return to the nostalgic world of 8-bit Mega Man, but 10 not building upon 9's gameplay did more harm than good, especially once controversial games like 7 and 8 started getting Vindicated by History for trying new things with the formula and making a welcome graphical shift as opposed to being stuck in the past with 8 bit graphics. An 11th game was announced several years after, and came out to much success, alongside comic books, compilations, and crossovers preceding it. Only time will tell if this happens yet again.
  • The Mega Man Legends series died at its second official game, with the announcement of the Nintendo 3DS revival's cancellation sparking a very angry reaction from passionate Legends fans looking forward to the project. There have still been regular merchandise and crossover appearances.
  • The Mega Man X series more or less died from oversaturation and the two-hit combo of the rushed X6 and the completely misbegotten X7. X7 featured a misguided shift to 3D, an annoying new protagonist stealing X's thunder, awful English voice acting, overly-complicated Maverick designs, rehashing from X1 level design, useless weapons, rehashing from X4 storywise, and a collectathon sidequest that could take hours, the worst part being that those collectables can easily become Lost Forever. X8 and Command Mission, managed to heal some of these wounds, but it was too late. After Mega Man 11, two compilations were released, and did pretty well. It has also been a regular in crossovers since 2009, often serving as the face of the franchise in these crossovers. It did come back somewhat with the game Rockman X: DiVE (which is currently Japan-only, as the title implied) and is doing very well, though even there, later renditions have it crossover with earlier and later entries such as the Zero series, the ZX series, and the Legends series.
  • The Network Timeline managed to be more or less completely killed with Star Force 2 failing, followed with the excellent Star Force 3 not being able to save the series, along with the oversaturation of the series at the time, the declining toyline sales, a disappointing re-release of the original Battle Network (which had come to a decisive ending, much like Zero) and even the anime flopping (and not even adapting 3). The later games, from there, would focus mainly on the main timeline, and there wasn't another alternate universe until nearly a decade later, and even those ones did even worse; Mega Man Fully Charged, was completely Western-made and flopped on TV without a game being made for it, and its plot points will be tied up in a comic book miniseries, and Pachislot Rockman Ability was never seen outside of a Japanese pachinko machine. Star Force itself was the last major series to receive playable representation in X-Dive, with the game having received crossover armors from Monster Hunter before it. However, the recent Legacy Collection for Battle Network was the fastest and best-selling Mega Man game in years, and even got into EVO, so there's hope.
  • ZX Advent had lukewarm sales and ended both ZX and Inti Creates' style of Mega Man games. While they did make two more games, see Mega Man 10 above for the results. 11 would be the first game made internally by Capcom since Star Force 3. The fourth Super Smash Bros game refused to acknowledge Zero and ZX, but there would be minor representation in Ultimate.
• Final Fight: Streetwise proved to be a critical dud and put an end to any further games in the Final Fight continuity. Most, if not all, of its characters now live on as part of Street Fighter canon. This is to the point where the official profile for Kyle Travers attempts to distance him from the game.
• The Capcom vs. Whatever series was first killed with Street Fighter X Tekken, home to extreme pay-to-win mechanics, a swath of disc-locked content (some of which was NEVER made available on certain platforms), bizarre and unappealing guest characters, an inconsistent tone, and a few unwanted characters from both franchises sullying the roster. This caused Tekken X Street Fighter to enter a lengthy period of Development Hell. It seems to have been buried further by Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite, with ugly graphics, characters whose film rights were owned by Fox being conspicuously absent, forgettable music, and a dull metagame.
  • Ironically, there's at least one online petition to re-release SFxT on newer consoles. Vindicated by History? Who knows...
  • As of 2021, Katsuhiro Harada has said that Tekken vs Street Fighter has NOT been completely shelved, as shown by Akuma's inclusion in Tekken 7, which also gives him canon relevance unlike other guests.
  • Furthermore, SNK have shown interest in doing a third Capcom Vs. SNK entry, saying Capcom are interested as well.
• While the Resident Evil 3: Nemesis remake fortunately didn't kill off Resident Evil as a whole, various factors, including the controversial rewriting of Jill's character to be a lot more abrasive compared to the original game, cutting out a significant portion of aspects from the original game, including the clock tower, and coming across as more of a lazily-made cash grab nevertheless resulted in Capcom outright taking away MTwo's rights to develop the Resident Evil 4 remake and handing it over to the team that made the better-received Resident Evil 2 remake, as well as that remake being delayed until 2023 specifically to make sure it stayed true to the story. The fact that a large part of the cast never even played Resident Evil 3 and thus were completely unfamiliar with the characters they were portraying only added fuel to the fire, as well as making controversial changes on the fly.
  • On that note, Resident Evil 6 came very close to being this for the franchise as a whole due to the over-emphasis on action sequences over survival horror as well as having a story mode that lacked little if any real connections between each group of characters, and also the characters themselves, namely Chris, Ada, and Leon, not being written particularly well. It got so bad that it resulted in a soft-reboot in the form of Resident Evil VII: Biohazard to get back to the roots of Resident Evil.

THQ

• The Nicktoons Unite! series died after Nicktoons: Globs of Doom‍'‍s poor reception. THQ has since given up on Nicktoons Licensed Games, so the game that followed Globs of Doom was 2K Games' Nicktoons MLB, a crossover between Nicktoons characters and real MLB players, with no actual story, as would subsequent Nickelodeon crossover games (though take out the MLB players, obviously). It wouldn't be until the late 2010s that THQ's successor, THQ Nordic, would try to do more licensed games with Nickelodeon, with a successful remake of Battle for Bikini Bottom. Regardless, the Nicktoons Unite series proper has yet to return; it took until 2023 to get a Nickelodeon crossover game with an actual story.
• THQ released two Destroy All Humans! games in 2008 - Big Willy Unleashed for the Wii, and then Path of the Furon for PlayStation 3/Xbox 360 - after original developer Pandemic Studios was snapped up by Electronic Arts. Neither game managed to successfully capture the spirit of the first two games, and sold terribly as a result.
• With the underwhelming reception of Red Faction: Armageddon and the multiplayer-focused Battlegrounds, THQ has announced that it won't be doing any more RF games for a while. Of course, if they listened to the fans who made the second to last game Red Faction Guerrilla a hit, they'd have continued RFG's open world destruction gameplay style instead of making a generic underground corridor shooter.
• The publisher also canned its MX vs. ATV franchise after the various changes in gameplay to MX vs. ATV: Alive left fans cold.

Square Enix / Eidos Interactive

• Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness didn't sell well, so Eidos passed the franchise's development rights on from Core Design to Crystal Dynamics. Thankfully, the franchise today is still going strong under Crystal Dynamics.
• Deus Ex: Invisible War was the much anticipated sequel to the seminal Deus Ex. It was so poorly received (by the community; it received decent marks from critics) that developer Ion Storm: Austin was driven to collapse, and the spin-off title Deus Ex: Clan Wars was changed to Project Snowblind to remove negative association with the ballyhooed franchise. Another title in the series wouldn't be made until 2011's Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
• Act Raiser II was an In Name Only sequel that lacked the original game's popular Simulation Mode. The unGodly difficulty level couldn't have helped it out at all, either.
• After Unlimited Saga was released in 2002, the only new SaGa games were just remakes of existing games in the series aside from a few browser and mobile games, up until Scarlet Grace made an earnest effort to revive the series. Despite positive reception, the game has yet to be followed up on.
• Dawn of Mana effectively killed off the World of Mana series with frustrating and nonsensical gameplay and a level system that reset whenever you started a new chapter, which meant Loads And Loads Of Grinding.
• Front Mission Evolved crashed and burned in Japan, but it has been generally better received in America. The poor ratings/sales have more or less ended the future of Front Mission video games (the franchise still lives on with its manga and novels, which remain very popular in Japan due to its high storytelling qualities). Ironically, among all things, Evolved was panned for its terrible storytelling.

Sega

• Sega's Shinobi franchise was killed quite dead by the poor Shinobi Legions installment in 1995, not returning until a reboot in 2002. It died again in 2004 with Nightshade (2003 video game), which itself was a perfectly good game, but had little to no marketing and its link to the Shinobi franchise was not played up, so it sat in obscurity, and was released alongside a forgettable GBA game. Unfortunately, the Nintendo 3DS game also went unnoticed and even sank its developer. Lizardcube wanted to put Joe into Streets of Rage 4, but they were unable to, due to Sega's, erm, labyrinthine corporate structure.
• On a similar note, Shenmue was a Franchise Killer after the first episode in the US owing both to the end of the Sega Dreamcast and slow gameplay, but the second episode (of a proposed four) was released to the rest of the world. Unfortunately, the second episode managed to fail financially on both the Dreamcast and the Xbox, rendering its huge and startling cliffhanger the end. As the mastermind behind the series, Yu Suzuki, has left Sega, there is little hope of revival... Up until they announced Shemnue 3 anyway.
• Virtual On MARZ arguably killed its series. The game was changed from a 3D Fighting Game to an arena-based Beat'Em Up (of sorts, Virtual On has guns), it became single-player, had a horrible, generic anime-like plot, and the English version was plagued by Blind Idiot Translation. Ironically enough, most of the cameos Virtual On has gotten elsewhere (outside of indie circles) are more heavily based on MARZ than any other part of the series, namely in Super Robot Wars Alpha 3, in which the robots had human voices, and featured Hatter, who only appeared in MARZ.
• Alex Kidd and the Enchanted Castle flopped so badly that Sega ditched the titular character as their mascot, and replaced him with Sonic the Hedgehog. While Alex probably didn't have much of a future as Sega's mascot anyway, since the company wanted a more "hip" audience for the Genesis, his series would probably have survived if Enchanted Castle had been better received. Instead, he only appeared in the Dolled-Up Installment Alex Kidd in Shinobi World before disappearing off the gaming map.
• And speaking of Sonic, it seems his spin-off series have been dying one by one. The two-hit combo of Sonic Rush Adventure and Sonic Rivals 2 killed original handhelds in favor of handheld counterparts to the home games returning, Sonic and the Black Knight ended the Storybook series, Free Riders ended non-crossover racing games, the aforementioned handheld counterparts were curtailed by the disastrous Lost World, the Classic revival was killed by Sonic 4 Episode 2... And now with the total failure of Rise of Lyric, the entire franchise was hanging by a thread... Until the Phantom Ruby saga (moreso Mania than Forces) proved a huge success. However, Team Sonic Racing flopped and was quickly abandoned by the developers. It would take another six years until a new Sonic racing game in the form of Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds was announced. However, time will tell if that will revive the Sonic racing series.

Electronic Arts

• Though Ultima IX was already planned to be the last game in the third trilogy, the way it turned out ensured that there would be no fourth trilogy.
• The Command and Conquer franchise got killed off after the release of its fourth game of the main series, and that was only a few years after solid hits by the third games of both the main series and the Red Alert spin-off series. With EA having so many other Cash Cow Franchises at the time Tiberian Twilight came and tanked, there's little possibility they would give the franchise another chance now.
  • EA has announced that it's developing a sequel to Generals, but it remains to be seen if it will be any good or not.
• EA Sports' NBA Live series was renamed NBA Elite for the 2011 year. However, the game's demo was so awful that they yanked it and cancelled the game weeks from release (as well as the 2012 edition). It didn't help that their primary competitor, Take Two's NBA 2K11, is widely considered one of the best sports games of all time.
• Need for Speed as a franchise kept going, but the poor reception of Need for Speed: Rivals, marked the end of the European helmed production with the 2015 reboot returning the franchise to tuner culture set-up that started in Need for Speed: Underground.

Activision

• Tony Hawk: Ride was meant to revive a franchise that was long stagnated and decaying by making the player use a skateboard peripheral that didn't work as well as advertised. Combined with Hawk himself saying critics decided to hate it before it came out, gamers weren't likely to be interested in a sequel, as the poor sales of Shred eventually convinced series publisher Activision to shelf the series for a while before announcing a "back-to-basics" reboot with Tony Hawk's Pro Skater HD. Just a few years after that, Pro Skater 5 was rushed to market and infested with bad business practices, killing the series once again, an HD remake of the first two entries notwithstanding.
• The Guitar Hero franchise came to a halt after Warriors of Rock lost out to Rock Band 3. It didn't help that fans had gone through exposure fatigue with the release of several different attempts at spinoffs in the previous two years (Band Hero, DJ Hero) within several months of each other. Activision, for their part, have recognized that DJ Hero was the Guitar Hero Franchise Killer - they spent so much time and creative energy on DJH that they forgot that GH might have needed some love too (four spinoffs != love).
  • On a similar note, Rock Band appears to be hanging up on its five-button traditional gameplay, possibly due to the rather disappointing 82,000 units Green Day: Rock Band sold, and has chosen to expand on the Pro Mode from Rock Band 3.
• Soldier of Fortune: Payback doesn't fit with the canon of the first two games, and it doesn't help that it ends with a Cliff Hanger that will likely never be resolved. This isn't surprising, since it was made by a completely different developer and released as a budget game.
• The Crash Bandicoot franchise went on an almost decade-long hiatus after the failure of Mind Over Mutant in 2008. It wasn't until June 2017 that the N. Sane Trilogy, a compilation game featuring remakes of the first three Crash games, would be released, earning great praise from critics and fans alike. This later resulted in Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled, a remake of the original Crash Team Racing that is expanded into a Dream Match Game featuring characters from all over the series, and Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time, which picks up where Warped left off. The reception to Crash Team Rumble, and the increasing de-emphasis of the brand, may have killed the series all over again.
• Not counting his appearances in the Skylanders franchise (which itself died off after Imaginators due to the toys clogging up shelves and a lack of innovation), the Spyro the Dragon franchise lay dormant for a decade after the release of The Legend of Spyo: Dawn of the Dragon. However, when the Spyro: Reignited Trilogy, which features updated versions of the first three Spyro games, was released in November 2018, it was met with near-universal praise, similar to N. Sane Trilogy, & he's been a regular guest in newer Crash games, but no brand-new entry has been announced since.

Nintendo

• Chibi-Robo: Park Patrol sold very poorly in the US (largely due to initially being a Wal-Mart exclusive), which in turn caused the next sequel to be Japan-only. However, when that game turned out to be a massive success, Nintendo decided to bring the series back overseas on the 3DS with a downloadable title called Chibi Robo: Photo Finder, a game that put less focus on the housekeeping aspect of the original games and more focus on the use of the 3DS camera. The game received mostly average reviews, again seemingly putting the series in jeopardy. Nintendo would announce another Chibi-Robo title for the 3DS that did away with the housekeeping concept entirely in favor of side-scrolling platforming called Chibi Robo: Zip Lash, even coming with a Chibi Robo amiibo. The series' creator stated that Zip Lash would likely be the last game in the series if it sold poorly...and it did.
• One could argue that F-Zero: GP Legend was this for the F-Zero series. In addition to performing poorly sales-wise, it didn't help either that poor word-of-mouth effectively sunk the accompanying Animated Adaptation before it even hit North American airwaves. While there was only one other sequel to GP Legend (2005's F-Zero Climax), it was never released outside of Japan due to GP Legend's overall poor reception in North America. This was all also combined with Shigeru Miyamoto admitting to having Writer's Block in terms of bringing new ideas to the series. Nothing happened outside of Smash and a few other crossovers until 2023 with the announcement of a new spin-off entry called F-ZERO 99, and even that game re-uses a lot of assets from the original SNES game.
• Fire Emblem:
  • The Fire Emblem Tellius games seem to be this for home-console-based titles in the series, as the next games would be on portable systems, such as the Nintendo 3DS. The series returned to bigger consoles (in this case: Nintendo Switch) solely on 2017 (via Fire Emblem: Warriors) and then in 2019 (via Fire Emblem: Three Houses)
  • The game most fans blame for putting the series on the edge of cancellation in the first place is, ironically, the remake of the first game, Shadow Dragon. To make the game faithful to the original, Intelligent Systems deliberately eschewed many of the features that made the later games so successful, like the Support system and the Weapon Triangle, resulting in a game that appealed to long-time fans in Japan but came across as Seinfeld Is Unfunny to Western players who got started with Elibe, Magvel, or Tellius, as well as newcomers eager to finally see the game where Marth actually hails from. That, and some questionable design decisions about what Intelligent Systems did add, gave Shadow Dragon a cold reception in the West. Although it was still a financial success, Nintendo decided on going back to a Japan-only release for the remake of the sequel, Mystery of the Emblem (which, ironically, fixed many of the complaints people had about Shadow Dragon), leading to the series' tough financial straits by the time Awakening was made.
  • Fire Emblem Awakening is an inversion. Due to stagnating sales of previous Fire Emblem titles, as revealed in an interview with a Spanish website, it was decided that if the game sold fewer than a quarter million units, it would have been the last game in the series. The opposite happened, and Awakening not only became one of the best selling titles in the franchise, but it caused a significant Newbie Boom.
• The poorly-received Metroid: Other M put the Metroid series on ice for a second time (the first was the long hiatus between Super Metroid in 1994 and Metroid Prime in 2002 while Metroid wrestled with the Video Game 3D Leap). Despite good initial sales, poor word-of-mouth took its toll and new copies were rapidly marked down to bargain price. And Yoshio Sakamoto, the franchise co-creator who was heavily involved with Other M, said at the time that he didn't plan to return to Metroid or any of his other traditional video game creations any time soon. Only four years later, at E3 2014, Nintendo confirmed that new installments for both 2D and 3D-style Metroid games entered the planning stages, with Metroid Prime: Federation Force being unveiled in 2015 to even bigger skepticism, especially when Nintendo did a DYOA against the fan game AM2R (which, as the title implies, was a fanmade remake of Metroid II: Return of Samus). Thankfully, Samus Returns (aka, the official remake of Metroid II) as well as the announcement of Metroid Prime 4 revived the franchise, with hype being further increased with the announcement of the release of the previously Development Hell-sentenced game Metroid Dread.
• Planet Puzzle League was a perfectly good game on its own, but received extremely negative consumer reception in Japan for almost completely ditching the Kawaisa aspect it had previously sold itself on. Other than a few Virtual Console rereleases of the original Panel de Pon, there hasn't been a new game in the series since.
• The Broken Base that started with Star Fox Adventures managed to finally come back to bite the Star Fox franchise in the ass with Star Fox Command. It was the poorest selling game in the series to date, and barring the Nintendo 3DS remake of Star Fox 64, it took an entire decade for the series to receive a new title through Star Fox Zero for the Wii U. Alas, Star Fox Zero received polarizing reviews, and has reportedly sold even less than Command did, which paints a very bleak future of the series.
• The Legendary Starfy seems to be this for the Starfy series, as the series hasn't had a new game in 8 years, and it was sadly the only game in the series to come out in America, and didn't even come out in Europe. While it did get good reviews in America, it sold poorly, and it wasn't received as well and didn't sell as well as the first four games in Japan, mainly due to being dumbed-down from the previous titles.
• Wario World, Wario: Master of Disguise, and Wario Land: Shake It! all received decent reviews from critics, but they sold so poorly that the Wario Land series hasn't seen any new installments since 2008. In fact, no Land characters have been seen in any of Mario's party or sport games, nor in Wario Ware.
• The poor critical reception of Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash seemed to have done this for Mario Tennis and other Mario sport games... until Aces gave the series a proper shot in the arm.
• While both Mario and Zelda fortunately weren't negatively affected too much, their respective games Hotel Mario, Faces of Evil, Wand of Gamelon, and Zelda's Adventure ended up being partially responsible for killing interest in the Nintendo Phillips CD-i system (alongside its infamously poor controls, having an extremely poorly chosen set of game libraries such as educational games, point-and-click games, and even pornographic games), which also had the consequence of cancelling two Mario games in development (one being an edutainment game involving America called Mario Takes America, and the other being Super Mario Wacky Worlds) and a Donkey Kong game, as well as there being no CD-based Nintendo games being made until the Nintendo Gamecube nearly a decade later. There would never be a non-Japanese-developed Zelda game ever again, and there wouldn't be a game with Zelda in a playable fashion until a decade or two later with Spirit Tracks and the Hyrule Warriors games, not counting Super Smash Bros.

Other

• Turok: Evolution managed to kill off the franchise, no thanks to silly elements such as Tobias Bruckner, the cyborg cowboy riding a Tyrannosaurus Rex, along with the game's numerous other problems. Probably no coincidence that publisher Acclaim went bankrupt shortly after the release of this and BMX XXX. The 2008 Turok relaunch wasn't a bad game, exactly — it just had the bad luck to be an average shooter during a time when great shooters were glutting the market. A sequel was planned, but was cancelled. Dreamworks, Turok's current owners, have done nothing since.
  • On that note, BMX XXX ended up being this for the BMX series. It was originally planned to be another BMX title with Dave Mirra sponsoring it, but as noted in Executive Meddling, the developers decided to try and edge it up with crude sexual humor, including nudity, and even falsely claimed that Dave Mirra was sponsoring the change despite Mirra making it very clear beforehand that he wanted no part in it, resulting in a huge lawsuit, as well as the game itself being banned from various stores due to its advertised content, especially after news reports reported on the graphic elements.
• Betrayal at Krondor was supposed to be the first of a revolutionary series of games that combined adventure novel-style storytelling with interactive gameplay, in a setting based on The Riftwar Cycle by Raymond Feist. And while the game itself was very much successful, its sequel, Return to Krondor, was ruined by Executive Meddling and license problems and was released woefully unfinished and underpolished, making this a bad enough experience for Feist that he's been unwilling to risk a repeat experience.
• Although Xenosaga was meant to be a six-part series, it ended after three games. None of the games individually was primarily responsible for the premature end, but altogether the games didn't perform as well as expected. Episode II performed so poorly that part of Episode III's selling point was that it (debatably) coherently summarized Episode II, removing the need to play it to understand the story. Players were thankful, but after the blow Episode II had dealt the franchise, almost every industry commentator observed that Episode III would have to be perfect in every way to keep the series afloat. A Spiritual Successor known as Xenoblade exists.
• The ninth installment of the main Might and Magic series is generally regarded as the reason the developer stuck with the Heroes spinoff from then on; this was mainly due to the fact that the graphics of the engine had to be extensively upgraded in order to compete. However, all of the company's resources went into that and not into, say, a very good plot. There were a lot of miscellaneous spinoffs at the time, and was part of 3D0's doomsday, and killed the original continuity of the series for good. The series was bought by Ubisoft, and guess what? Only one more main-series game was ever made under Ubisoft.
  • Furthermore, the entire series died off after the 7th entry in the Heroes series, as not only did the prior game kill its developer, the game also had major expansion pack delays and a similar poor reception. The final nail in the coffin for the series, however, was the Showdown spinoff, which completely failed to attract players and was shut down after only 6 months.
• Bloody Roar 4 is considered the worst entry in the franchise by its small but dedicated fanbase. No new entries in the series were made after this one, but Eighting Raizing has since gone on to develop other licensed fighting games since as the Naruto Clash of Ninja series, Fate Unlimited Codes and Tatsunokovs Capcom.
• With the surprise success of Zombies Ate My Neighbors, Lucas Arts decided to take a similar property in development and rework it into a sequel. Ghoul Patrol was a bomb, with tedious, confusing gameplay and none of the original's fun spirit. At least there's still the Wii Virtual Console release of the original game.
• Bubsy did well enough to get a few 2D sequels and a short-lived cartoon show. Then came Bubsy 3D, seen as one of the worst games ever made, which smashed head-first into the Polygon Ceiling and destroyed any possible future for the series as a whole. The character's status as a Memetic Loser and icon of unadulterated 1990s pap led to an ironic relaunch, but he will never earnestly be loved again, with him being consigned to the disgraced field of mobile games since then. Even then, only one, Paws on Fire, was ever made prior to the death of series creator Michael Berlyn in 2023, paws-ibly sealing the franchise's fate.
• The poor critical reception of the 2008 Alone in The Dark game killed off the series. It's even worse when you consider that even though the game developers delayed the release of the game for three years to try to stave off the bad publicity generated by Uwe Boll's failed film adaptation, some elements from the film still made it into the new game. From there, the 2015 Illumination spin-off finished off the series for good until the rights ended up at THQNordic, who plans to do a reboot of the series that returns to the roots.
• The video game adaptation of E.T.: The Extraterrestrial deserves a dishonorable mention here for temporarily acting as a partial medium killer. The other half is the disastrously bad Atari 2600 port of the arcade classic Pac-Man. The makers were so confident in Pac-Man's success that they made more game cartridges than there were consoles to run them on. Smart, guys. Real smart. It has been theorized numerous times that Atari expected a significant rise in 2600 sales after the release of E.T., so the additional cartridges would have make sense had it worked out that way.
• Fatal Frame III‍'‍s poor reviews and worse sales killed the franchise... except in Japan, where there has been another game released, and could conceivably be more.
  • III's performance had nothing to do with the reason IV did not get localized. IV was not localized because of game-breaking bugs that both Nintendo and Tecmo refused to take responsibility for (and Nintendo not wanting to bring over a very imperfect game). A remake of II is being made, however, which will test the franchise's viability anew.
• Five years elapsed between Winback and its sequel, which in the end turned out completely awful and flopped.
• Blood II: The Chosen is the reason Caleb won't live again anytime soon.
• Myth III: The Wolf Age wasn't especially terrible, though it was significantly worse than the first two, and used the much-reviled Gamespy Arcade for multiplayer instead of Bungie.net, killing all hopes for a fourth installment.
• Driv3r, which was not particularly good, ends on a Cliff Hanger with the protagonist flatlining after being shot by the Big Bad. Then Infogrames made an In Name Only sequel, Parallel Lines, and that didn't perform so well either. It took several years (and a new publisher) for the franchise to return to form with Driver: San Francisco, which has taken strides to distance itself from the Grand Theft Auto-cloned Driv3r and Parallel Lines by going back to the style of the original two games.
• Jet Moto 3 was a decent game, but it sold poorly, resulting in the planned fourth game being cancelled. So far, there are no plans to revive the series.
• The first two games in the Double Dragon series were pretty successful at the arcade and on consoles. The first NES game even sold out on the day of its release. But then came Double Dragon 3, which was farmed out to an external developer, featured a poorly-thought out plot involving Mineral MacGuffins, flat level designs, fewer moves than its predecessors, and an ill-conceived shopping gimmick obviously added as a transparent means of inserting more tokens into the machine. It also didn't include the innovations of Final Fight. There were a couple more Double Dragon sequels after the third game, but the series never quite recovered from there: the NES version of the third game (while considered to be an improvement from the arcade version) is ridiculously hard, the SNES-exclusive fourth game was an Obvious Beta, and the last two games made before Technos went out of business were standard competitive fighting games that did nothing to stand out from an already overcrowded market (though the SNES/Genesis/Jaguar game is considered far worse than its Neo Geo counterpart, which is generally seen as decent). The movie "adaptation" of the series wasn't helping matters either...
  • Wanderer of the Wastes helped kill the franchise a second time over after the success of Neon. Previously, there had been a few handheld and mobile games later on. The following game, IV, met a mixed reception. The series had made only a few crossover appearances between then and the announcement of Rise of the Dragons.
• Rumble Roses suffered from a Broken Base before it was even released, with both Anime and Professional Wrestling fans interested in the game. During development it became obvious the game was designed to cater to anime fans, but it was a decent enough wrestling game that the pro wrestling camp wasn't fully alienated. Then came the sequel, Rumble Roses XX, with a labyrinthine and ludicrously time-consuming unlocking system, a completely pathetic create-a-wrestler feature, and a boring street fighting mode that no one liked. The killer, though, was the "Queens Match Mode", done in a style of Japanese erotica that, through Values Dissonance, came across as extremely creepy Fan Disservice elsewhere, evaporating most of its international fanbase. To make matters worse, RRXX was released on a different platform (Xbox 360) than the original game (Play Station 2), killing much of its built-in audience.
• Rogue Squadron 3: Rebel Strike suddenly introduced half-assed Third-Person Shooter levels to the series, among other negative aspects, resulting in much backlash. Then Lair put the final nail in Factor 5's coffin.
• King's Quest: Mask of Eternity started with a very unwelcome Genre Shift, taking a franchise that prized itself on emphasizing a creative, non-violent option whenever possible and making a hack and slash third-person action game, with a Darker and Edgier tone that sharply veered from the gentle humor and fairy-tale style of the previous seven games. What really iced the cake was that none of the Daventry royal family got speaking parts — the Player Character might as well have been from a different franchise entirely. Some of the fan sites refuse to call it a King's Quest game at all. Even the Sierra "King's Quest Collection" quietly ignores it, and Roberta Williams herself was so dissatisfied with it that she refused to call the game King's Quest VIII, removing the numeral from the title altogether. Mask of Eternity's dubious status is reflected in the Fan Remake of King's Quest II, as you will receive full points whether or not you choose to knight Connor (acknowledging him as part of the story arc).
• Empire Earth III was a commercial and critical failure and is widely thought to be responsible for the end of the Empire Earth series and Mad Doc studios. Mad Doc even removed any trace of the game from their website before getting bought by Rockstar Games.
• Fade To Black, the 3D sequel to Flashback, slammed into the Polygon Ceiling head-on, crushing hopes of further sequels or a revival.
• There was a fourth Descent game planned, but it was cancelled due to poor sales of Descent 3 and Interplay going bankrupt. Interplay has recently come out of bankruptcy and re-registered the trademark, and there are rumors that the fourth game may yet be made.
• Master of Orion and Master Of Orion 2 were classics in the turn-based strategy genre. A toxic combination of Executive Meddling, Sequelphobic developers, and some other bad decisions resulted in a Master Of Orion 3 that bore a striking resemblance to doing one's taxes and was about as much fun. The game bombed hard on release, and since then there has been little hope that the series will be revived. Brad Wardell of Stardock expressed interest in making a fourth game in 2008, but his comments were mere speculation and there has been no follow-up.
• No One Lives Forever was killed by the terrible Interquel / Gaiden Game Contract J.A.C.K, causing Monolith Productions to abandon the series entirely.
• This nearly happened to the Ys series, with the fifth installement, Kefin, The Lost City of Sand. Kefin, perhaps, wasn't bad bad - but the game was only available on the Super Nintendo (with a franchise that had deep roots on the PC and Turbo Grafx 16), had very bland, generic graphics that looked like every other game of its era (which was even worse in context since the setting was supposed to be very exotic) and the music was all simple MIDI-synth (when Ys had become famous partly due to its powerful CD-supported Redbook-audio soundtracks). Fan backlash in Japan was intense, and it would be seven years before a new Ys game was made; the only thing that prevented the total death of the franchise was the good performance of remakes of the first two games, which were already in development when Kefin came out and were put out to recoup development costs.
• While SNK had previously attempted to move the Samurai Shodown franchise into the third dimension with Samurai Shodown 64 with limited success (average review scores, but new characters Shiki and Asura have appeared in other SNK games, such as Neo Geo Battle Coliseum), they tried again with Samurai Shodown Sen (an Interquel to the SamSho 64 games) more than a decade later. The game was a critical flop, with reviewers pointing out the confusing controls, poor character balancing, and ugly graphics. It wouldn't be until 2019 that the franchise would experiment a revival. Nakoruru would, however, immigrate into KOF between Sen and the relaunch. None of the characters added in Sen returned.
• Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude stumbled into, but ultimately survived, its transition into 3D. Its follow-up game, Box Office Bust, added platforming, shooting and brawling elements, none which the game did well at all. Reviewers everywhere ripped the game apart, giving it some of the lowest composite scores of any game in the modern console era. It took nearly a decade for him to get out of the doldrums, and the revival game brought the original protagonist, Larry Laffer, back into the fold via time-travel, rather than continue the Lovage series.
• The Western version of the first Kunio Kun game was a surprise hit in Britain, and Renegade became a Spin-Off series. The first two games were beloved by ZX Spectrum owners, but the third game — with its bizarre Time Travel plot, graphics that were monochrome even by Speccy standards, and gobs of Fake Difficulty resulting from poor controls, missing moves, and strict time limits — spelt an end to the series. Later Kunio Kun games, even those not developed in Japan, have refused to acknowledge these entries as well.
• After Atari's buy-out on Humongous Entertainment, the company tried to continue Putt-Putt and Pajama Sam. Putt-Putt's last game wasn't all too bad, it had some poor voice acting and way too much recycled content as well as was boring, but it's at least playable compared to their attempt at Pajama Sam, which had a very cringe-worthy choice of voice actor, a lame plot, Loads and Loads of Loading, and several other things. They didn't sell or score well enough to continue onward, while the Backyard Sports series continued to get a worse treatment, until it too was killed by Sandlot Sluggers and Rookie Rush, ill-done attempts to return the series to its roots.
• Lunar: Dragon Song seems to have done this for the Lunar series; stemming from poor sales, bad reviews, and absurd gameplay mechanics. There hasn't been a non-remake Lunar title since Dragon Song's release.
• Baten Kaitos: Origins came out near the end of the Game Cube's lifespan, four months before the Wii launch. Despite improving massively on EWLO's flaws, it was overlooked by a gaming community clamoring for next-gen consoles and never sold particularly well. With the rumored Nintendo DS installment canceled, the future of the series looks bleak. That said, however, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate included characters from Origins as well as EWLO (the first game) as spirits, so it might still be viable in the future.
• Majin Tensei was a decently-received Mega Ten spinoff in the Strategy RPG genre, which ended up doing well enough to recieve one more successful sequel. Then came Ronde for the Saturn. Development was farmed out to Access while Atlus worked on other games, resulting in a game so legendarily awful that the release of a preview demo caused literally thousands of canceled preorders — numbers that were virtually unprecedented in Japan at the time. Not only did it kill the Majin Tensei series (the only release in the series since was a cell phone game that came out 10 years later), but Atlus wouldn't release another Strategy RPG Mega Ten until Devil Survivor, twelve years later, which had entirely different gameplay from the earlier series to boot.
• Codemaster's separate successor to the original Operation Flashpoint series went down the drain already after its second installment, Red River. Unlike the first one, Dragon Rising, Red River took what made the series unique, threw nearly all of it out and turned itself into a generic Modern Warfare clone, a move that appealed to fans of neither series, so guess how well that went... Worse yet, Red River doubled as a Creator Killer, since Codemasters promptly closed down its Guildford studio after the game's failure. Meanwhile, OFP's original creators are still going strong with their Arm A series, apparently being the winner in the Dueling Games affair they had with the Codemasters' Spiritual Successor.
• Crystal Kingdom Dizzy ended up being this for the Dizzy series of Spectrum games. A full-priced title with a drop in quality from the previous budget titles, its relative failure would mean the planned next game Wonderland Dizzy would never be released. The creators have dug up several previously unreleased Dizzy games from the vault for direct-market releases, however, along with some ports to newer systems, but they eventually drifted away from Dizzy as they sought new work. There was an attempt to Kickstarter a new game called "Dizzy Returns", but the Kickstarter failed. In the end, no entirely new Dizzy game was released until Wonderful Dizzy in 2020, as a limited ZX Spectrum exclusive rather than being released for modern platforms.
• Virtual Hydlide, the attempted reboot of Hydlide in 3D, killed off a series that had been moderately well appreciated in Japan during the 8-bit era.
• Rygar: The Legendary Adventure was a good game, but didn't perform well enough to continue the series. It was less-than-spectacularly ported to the Wii several years hereafter, sealing the fate of the franchise. At one point, there was a Rygar 2 announced, but it ended up being Vaporware, and he hasn't even gotten any crossover appearances.
• Sly Cooper seems to have died thanks to Thieves in Time, a game developed by a D-tier developer in Sanzaru. Shortcomings include repetitive gameplay, poor level design, Penelope's Sudden Sequel Heel Syndrome, barely any Dimitri, and a huge missed opportunity with Clockwerk, not to mention a cliffhanger ending. Outside of a since cancelled TV series and feature film, nothing has been heard from Sly since.
• Madou Monogatari, after an absence of over a decade due to SEGA buying the Puyo Puyo rights and Compile's closure, was revived by Compile Heart in 2013 with Sei Madou Monogatari (Localized as Sorcery Saga: Curse of the Great Curry God). This proved to be a bad decision. Due to legal issues, none of the existing cast would be usable, and they were replaced with a cast of Captain Ersatzii with inferior designs, including some for the SEGA-created cast! (None of the characters who weren't in Puyo Puyo showed up either for whatever reason .) The gameplay was completely different, becoming a clone of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon rather than trying to be like the original series. The tone was also changed to more resemble the Puyo games, along with an Audience Shift, and none of the original writers worked on the game. Despite okay sales, nothing was heard from Madou again until 2023, where it was announced SEGA and Compile Heart would be working together to revive the series with the original cast.
• Dead or Alive 6 may have acted as this for the original fighting game portion of the franchise, due to the huge microtransactions that cost a ludicrous amount of money, as well as internet controversy which included among other things Yohei Shimbori making it sound as though big breasted women were inherently inhuman when discussing the toning down of the fanservice, to say little of the gutting of the fanservice itself. Fortunately, Xtreme Venus Vacation ensures that the franchise itself remains alive.
  • On that note, Dead or Alive 4 came pretty close to killing off the franchise due to its infamous difficulty level for combos, with Xtreme 2 not helping matters due to a lack of gameplay. Ironically, however, the latter game's PSP port, Dead or Alive Paradise, alongside Dead or Alive Dimensions, released in 2010 and 2011, respectively, managed to restore enough interest in the franchise to allow for Dead or Alive 5 to be made, which further breathed life into the franchise until Dead or Alive 6 as noted above.
• While Ratchet and Clank is still going strong to this day, its Naughty Dog counterpart Jak and Daxter wasn't able to survive after the failure of The Lost Frontier. Naughty Dog did try to remake the original in their new photorealistic style, but saw that as a bad idea and threw it out like the plague.
• Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts acted as this to the entire Banjo Kazooie franchise, largely thanks to the abrupt gameplay change as well as the excessive Self-Deprecation humor of the game. In fact, the titular characters, outside of the Xbox version of Sonic and Sega Racing, didn't make any reappearances until Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, almost a decade later. It also convinced Rare to make nothing but Kinect games for some time, and even when they did return to developing other games, they decided to make new IP and license out their old IP to other developers.
• Senran Kagura is a variation. No game in particular caused the franchise to stop making new games in the series, but rather, the franchise got shut down largely thanks to its producer resigning from the development company thanks to Sony's excessive censorship policies. That said, Shinobi Masters New Link is still functional, which similar to Xtreme Venus Vacation for Dead or Alive is the only reason Senran Kagura technically still is viable.
• Although Eternal Darkness did moderately well especially for a first person-developed (Nintendo made) M-rated game, its developer Silicon Knights attempted to create a sequel as well as a Spiritual Successor called Shadow of the Eternals, although it never gained traction, with any chance at the latter game being developed being destroyed when Silicon Knights filed for bankruptcy largely thanks to its lawsuit with Epic Games due to plagiarizing the Unreal Engine from the latter. That said, Eternal Darkness, due to technically being a first-party game by Nintendo, is indicated to still be viable due to Alex Roivas appearing as a spirit in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

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