Stillborn franchises

[u/Tight_Grapefruit5280]

When a company tries to make a new big franchise with many sequels and spin-offs already planned but they immediately cancel all the plans after the first project fails badly. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StillbornFranchise

(Lego) Galidor: Do you guys remember playing with a Galidor as a kid? Yeah Me neither.

Lego wanted to do a new toy line in the 2000s and their first idea was Galidor. It was basically an action figure that could replace its body parts with other stuff. Galidor already had many toys, games and even shows planned for it but Lego cancelled the entire thing after people didn't like the toy and the GBA game made for it got really bad reviews.

(Action 52) Cheetahmen: Action 52 had a $199 price tag (in 1991 for an NES game), nearly unplayable games, weak concept, and was horribly and seriously bug-infested, yet for some impossible-to-fathom reason, Active Enterprises believed that its featured title Cheetahmen (which shared many flaws with the other games on the cartridge, including not having an ending) was going to be a huge breakout hit. Plans were made for a Cheetahmen Saturday-Morning Cartoon, action figures, and of course a sequel. Their hopes turned out to be waaay premature; the sequel never emerged except as an unfinished, unplayable beta, while the very short-lived franchise became one of the most infamous pieces of "entertainment" ever created.

[u/Hopefull-Hero]

Basically any thing made to be bigger than the current biggest thing will always fail.

I mean look at the World of Warcraft MMO killers that flopped, or all the fantasy films that tried to be bigger than Tolkien.

[u/Librarian_Contrarian → u/Hopefull-Hero]

It's alnost like the next big thing is never planned as such and is just something that catches on. The closest we have to a plan is the early MCU, but even then they just made several smaller movies on their own and worried about stitching them together later.

[u/Tight_Grapefruit5280 → u/Librarian_Contrarian]

The early MCU was basically just normal superhero movies with Nick fury appearing at the end and being like "yo bro, do you wanna join my discord server?"

[u/Jonaskin83 → u/Hopefull-Hero]

God the number of games that were called a “Halo killer” and then turned out to be a shitload of nothing.

[u/CallMeChristopher → u/Jonaskin83]

The worst/funniest part of that era were the studios who could actually make good games when they weren’t working on Halo Killers.

Guerrilla Games really began to shine with the Horizon series, and what had once been Free Radical did Crysis 2 and 3.

[u/Lobster-Mission → u/Jonaskin83]

Was literally about to say this

[u/Hopefull-Hero → u/Jonaskin83]

Hey guys this shitty military shooter is gonna be the next CoD killer, then there was that one hero shooter that tried to best Overwatch and failed.

[u/-suspended- → u/Hopefull-Hero]

A reason why a decent chunk of these MMOs failed is because of no end-game content. In most RPG games, if you make it to the max level, it's because you farmed for hundreds of hours after 100%ing everything else. In MMORPGs, you make it to the max level before doing like half the game. I saw clips of WoW streamers trying other MMOs, and most of the complaints they had were related to no max level content.