Genre Killer / Video Games

• The Great Video Game Crash of 1983 was caused chiefly by an overabundance of competitors in a fledgling market and competition from superior micro-computers. The straw that broke the camel's back was a pair of releases for the Atari 2600, an awful port of Pac-Man and an E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial game that was quite obviously rushed out the door for the holidays, despite having more copies of the game made than there were Atari 2600 consoles that could play it. These twin disasters killed the home console market in the United States for about two years. Perhaps more importantly, it effectively wiped out North American game/console development, to the point where it took over two decades to fully regain the ground that had been lost to Japanese competitors. There wasn't a successful game console from an American company between the Atari 2600, which died around 1983, and the Microsoft Xbox, released in November of 2001, eighteen years later.
  • When Nintendo debuted the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985, they redesigned the console to work more like a VCR and bundled it with a light gun and battery-operated robot peripheral that only worked with two games, primarily to disguise the fact that it actually was a video game console. It worked, and the rest is history.
  • It's important to note that the impact was far more limited in Europe, especially the UK. Brits were using 8-bit microcomputers as the main way of playing home videogames by 1982, which would last until the late '80s/early '90s when consoles started taking off (with the Mega Drive and SNES). This may also be related to why Nintendo consoles such as the NES, Wii, and Switch tend not to sell especially well in the UK even if it's one of the "Big Three" console manufacturers elsewhere, as there wasn't the same market vacuum for them to fill as there was in the United States.
  • The crash killed off a flood of maze games that weren't Pac-Man^note Amidar, Lock 'n Chase, Chase the Chuck Wagon, Ladybug, and even Namco's own Rally-X, just to name a few as they were found to be too derivative (running around collecting items while avoiding various monsters and hazards), and that technology improved to the point that one can make so much more. Today only the Pac-Man franchise is known to the general audience, and due to its immense popularity and being so well-done, it is impossible to create a maze game anymore without being part of or inspired by the series.
• The Anthropomorphic Mascot with Attitude platformers that sprang up in the wake of Sonic the Hedgehog started petering out after Bubsy and the Battletoads dipped their toes into the world of multimedia franchising and saw incredibly disastrous results. When Bubsy subsequently underwent a catastrophic Video Game 3D Leap with the infamous Bubsy 3D, the resulting backlash more or less exterminated every radical mascot that was not the Trope Maker himself^note And even then, as many could tell you, he's not exactly had a good time of it either, at least since 2002. Thankfully, the general acclaim and quality of throwback platformers such as Freedom Planet and Spark the Electric Jester could hopefully spark the return of such "Sonic-lite" games. And by some miracle, even Bubsy's been getting more games as of late.
• FreeSpace 2 destroyed the space shooter genre born of Elite and popularized by Wing Commander. It was not the fault of the game itself, which most critics consider the height of the genre and for which fans are still putting out new content both graphical and gameplay,^note A common joke among fans of the game is that the reason it killed the genre was because it was so good that there was no point in making any further games: perfection had been achieved. but rather, how poorly it performed commercially: its initial sales were so bad that the genre was assumed dead and further development was halted, which most attributed to Interplay's (lack of) marketing. Attempts were still made to revive the genre, such as 2000's Tachyon: The Fringe having Bruce Campbell for its main character and gameplay additions like lateral thrusters, which was also featured in 2001's Independence War 2, as well as games considered staples of the genre like Freelancer, the X-Series, or Oolite (in and of itself a Fan Remake of Elite), but for a long while the genre was never able to reach the levels of popularity it had seen while Elite or Wing Commander were still going strong.
  • Thankfully, the advent of Kickstarter and other crowdfunding websites has seemingly restarted the genre, with games like Chris Roberts' Star Citizen, Elite Dangerous, and other games like Strike Suit Zero leading the charge. No Man's Sky NEXT, launched in 2018 and being increasingly recognized as an actually good redemption from the terrible flop that was the initial release of No Man's Sky, could slowly but surely spell the return of the space shooter genre, even if space shooting is only half of the game's overall experience.
• WCW and ECW folding within a couple months of each other in early 2001 pretty much killed the Professional Wrestling game genre outside of the games bearing the WWE license, which despite having their problems still sell well to the hardcore WWE fans. In the early 2000s a few developers tried putting out games without a tie to a promotion (but often featuring real wrestlers not employed by WWE) like Legends of Wrestling, Backyard Wrestling, and Rumble Roses, which sold well enough to get sequels but not well enough to get extended to the next generation of consoles, and little else since. The only other licensed games since WCW and ECW imploded were a TNA game in 2008 and a AAA game in 2010, both of which were panned by critics (of both video games and wrestling) and had pretty weak sales. AEW's potential offering being stuck in Development Hell isn't helping^note AEW Fight Forever was finally released in June 2023 and while the hardcore AEW fans are into it the reaction from everyone else has been somewhere between "Meh" (averaging around 65% on Metacritic depending on the console) and "This took four years?", nor is a general decline in the popularity of wrestling as a whole. Fire Pro Wrestling is still chugging along (though it usually doesn't leave Japan) mainly thanks to name recognition and being cheap to produce^note Fire Pro is completely 2D and uses old-school sprite graphics and while the more recent games boast a roster of over 300 real wrestlers they use fake names so they don't have to pay said wrestlers, but the slow pacing and steep learning curve has mostly relegated Fire Pro to being a niche product for uber-smark fans.
• The unfortunate retail failure of Unreal Tournament III, backed up by the rise of freeware first-person shooters, led to the end of commercially released Arena Shooters, with team-based and/or "tactical" shooters like Call of Duty/Modern Warfare, the Battlefield series, and Left 4 Dead taking their place. Team Fortress 2 is one of the few "Quake-like" games released since, and while it is still being supported and heavily-played, it was actually first released in 2007; most everything else in its vein that has come out since UT3 has been free-to-play (TF2 three years after its initial release, Unreal Tournament 4, Quake Champions) or an update on a classic game (Quake Live). Not too surprisingly, publisher Midway Games, who had been marred with financial trouble for years and had hoped Unreal Tournament III would revitalize their fortunes, declared bankruptcy just a year-and-a-half later. The aforementioned UT4 could have restarted the genre, but it didn't attract a whole lot of attention even before Epic Games made a little game called Fortnite and pulled all their resources away from it. Even when nostalgic throwbacks to classic shooters came into vogue in the mid- to late-2010s, whether new games with old gameplay like Wolfenstein: The New Order or the 2016 Doom, or games that emulate the old look on top of it like DUSK or Ion Fury, they hewed more towards the earlier period of singleplayer-focused shooters back when they were still called "Doom clones", like Duke Nukem 3D or the first Quake.
  • It could also be said for true tactical shooters in the vein of the older Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon games, the ones with planning and stealth as major elements where the slightest muckup led to the death of your squad, due to the line being blurred between the aforementioned team-based shooters and the "true" tactical ones taking on more actionized elements. Attempts to bring the genre back have had limited success at best, with only an actual Rainbow Six game in the vein of its predecessors, Siege, being particularly well-received (and even then it plays more like Counter-Strike as a Hero Shooter); many other attempts marketed as being in the spirit of those games, like Takedown: Red Sabre, have met with near-universal negative reactions, mostly due to bad gameplay and little polish, though with the occasional successful release like Ready or Not. ARMA is an exception, with its third game seeing more than six years of support before there were even hints of a sequel, although the playerbase is comparatively niche and its focus is on realism so extreme, even compared to other tactical shooters, that its engine has been used as a training simulator for actual armies.
  • The only high-profile exception is the Halo franchise which, while taking a few elements from Call of Duty, remains faithful to its roots. And even then, it's not completely immune when putting its online statistics next to those of its immediate predecessors.
  • The failure of UT3, along with that of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and, to a lesser extent, Crysis, would also serve to kill off the "big-budget, PC-exclusive Tech-Demo Game" genre. Consoles had for the most part closed the power gulf with PCs, while the latter was increasingly hamstrung as a gaming platform by various factors including PC manufacturers increasingly eschewing dedicated graphics cards (leaving PCs with only motherboard-integrated graphics that usually ran games extremely poorly — and that was when they could run the games at all), many gamers getting sick of dealing with all the configuration issues that can go with PC gaming, and the poor reception of Windows Vista, which had launched earlier that year. As a result, it became largely accepted as standard among developers that all big-budget games from that point had to have some form of console release and, ideally, had to be designed for consoles first and foremost.
• The insane amount of Capcom Sequel Stagnation for the Guitar Hero franchise did this to the Rhythm Game genre in North America and Europe. Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock and Rock Band 3, released in late 2010, sold less than 1.5 million units combined, and the competition (Power Gig, et al.) outright bombed. While these are respectable figures given that both games come with expensive peripherals, compare this to Guitar Hero III (15 million units sold) and the original Rock Band (6 million), both released in 2007, and you can start to see how oversaturation of the market (a possible reason why Harmonix decided to focus more on DLC for the existing games rather than putting out a new title once a year, unlike Activision) has destroyed the genre's profitability. Following the commercial disappointments of the latest installments, MTV sold Rock Band developer Harmonix for 50 dollars and Activision briefly pulled the plug on the Guitar Hero series, and other developers, having bled money from their endeavors, have gotten out of the market. Due to its different audience and "real guitar" street cred, Rocksmith is the last man standing. It took five years after their "final" release (or two, considering that Rock Band DLC had still gone on until 2013) for the two main competitors to come back to the market for the eighth generation, via Rock Band 4 & Guitar Hero Live, the latter of which completely overhauled its guitar controller and outright abandoned the bass guitar & drums. Lukewarm sales, however, suggest that even for the creative strides these games took to distance themselves from their predecessors, it's still for nothing. Activision disliked how the new Hero game did on the market to the point that they sold the studio that developed the game to Ubisoft, the publisher of the aforementioned Rocksmith. Talk about ironic.
  • Dance-based Rhythm Games still hold popularity however. The Just Dance series may have been instrumental in killing off the once mighty Guitar Hero and Rock Band games. They were a less-expensive alternative, since they didn't require extra peripherals to play (unless you count the non-Nintendo versions which require a motion control sensor or a companion smartphone app, but it's still cheaper). Also, its casual appeal due to its use of both modern and classic pop songs, not just strictly rock, was part of the why it largely supplanted Guitar Hero and Rock Band as the go-to game for parties. (Not entirely unlike pop supplanting rock music outside the gaming sphere.)
• The 4X Real-Time Strategy subgenre was killed off when Empire Earth screwed up with its third installment and Age of Empires went bust with Ensemble closing down. Note that Ensemble going bust was Executive Meddling by Microsoft, who shut them down after they cranked out nothing but successful games.
  • Sins of a Solar Empire revived the genre a bit, but it's one of the few notable releases and it came out in 2008.
• World War II FPS games once reigned supreme, being bolstered by the successes of Medal of Honor, Battlefield 1942 and Call of Duty. Because of the successes of those three games, a plethora of imitators soon followed. While Brothers in Arms stood out for its greater focus on squad gameplay and being more akin to tactical shooters like Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon than arcadey shooters like those three, the vast majority of said imitators copied what those three titles did wholesale until they eventually drowned in their own excess and gamers, having grown tired of the repetitive nature of these games, began gravitating to alternatives. The final deathblow was the major failure of Hour of Victory, with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare writing its obituary soon after, heralding the shift from World War II shooters to modern-day shooters as the norm. Call of Duty: World at War would be the final World War II FPS to be released before the whole subgenre went into dormancy. The only games that would come out since would do so years later, such as Day of Infamy, Hell Let Loose, and the free-to-play Heroes & Generals. However, it should be noted that this only applies to purely historic type shooters (World at War was itself the final WWII-based Call of Duty game at the time, made mostly as a fall-back because Activision was convinced the modern-day jump wouldn't stick, and ending up only really noticed because of the Zombies mode that would become iconic to the franchise). Alternate History-type games with plots that haven't been seen (or, for that matter, read about in your history class) a million times before, like Sniper Elite and Wolfenstein, have still been going strong, the former helping itself by jumping on the zombies bandwagon while the latter has pushed itself beyond the historical war.
• In a rather similar vein to the Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns examples, the "pulp-cinematic modern military shooter" subgenre of first-person shooters was popularized by Modern Warfare, which was liked for its storytelling, comtemporary setting and dramatic scripted setpieces giving the games a Summer Blockbuster movie-like feel. A glut of imitators followed, many of which had little to offer and were derivative to a tee, culminating in the high-profile failure of Homefront, which ended up souring mainstream gamers' tastes towards these games. Rising backlash against the US military's involvement in the Middle East and criticism towards the Unfortunate Implications often present in these kinds of games also played a role in the subgenre's decline. This backlash would become unified with Spec Ops: The Line in 2012, which was acclaimed precisely for its merciless deconstruction of the subgenre that Modern Warfare popularized. While it didn't outright kill the subgenre, it effectively wrote its obituary. The only notable attempt to do a pulp-cinematic take akin to the Modern Warfare games since 2012 and still succeed is the Titanfall series, and even then it still has a number of features distinct enough to prevent it from being given the now-derisive label of "Call of Duty clone". Call of Duty still thrives to this day but this is because of Grandfather Clause courtesy of it being the Trope Maker and Trope Codifier of the subgenre, with most attempts outside of the series since 2012 being doomed to failure. Outside of Call of Duty the subgenre is effectively dead in the water, with little hope of recovery.
• Immersive Sims never had it easy from a commercial standpoint in spite of the games being overall well-received, very often being overshadowed by their more straighforward counterparts^note Wolfenstein 3-D when Ultima Underworld came out, Doom when System Shock came out, and Half-Life when System Shock 2 came out, but they still cultivated enough of a dedicated playerbase. However, the overall failure of Deus Ex: Invisible War (not helping was that it was released right after Call of Duty), soured what remaining goodwill there was towards the genre. Ion Storm Austin closed soon after, and the genre became dormant. It wouldn't be until the success of BioShock that the genre would start its road to recovery, culminating in the successes of Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Dishonored. However, the commercial failures of those two titles' respective sequels and Prey (2017) (not helping was them being shafted around and their nonexistent advertising) effectively ended their Genre Relaunch in the mainstream. Immersive sims are still being made to this day but are very often done so by indie developers and for a relatively niche audience.
• The Point-and-Click genre in its inventory management form was practically killed off by the success of Myst, and was only revived decades later via digital distribution as well as the serial format. The failure of the critically praised Grim Fandango in 1998 was seen as the final nail on the coffin for the genre, even though Escape from Monkey Island was released two years later – albeit with considerably less acclaim than prior Monkey Island games.
  • An alternative theory as to what killed point-and-click adventure games is presented by this article on Old Man Murray, in response to another article which blamed Myst's success for it - they filled themselves with so many contrived and illogical puzzles which no rational human being could conceive the answer to on their own (specifically citing the infamous "cat hair mustache" puzzle from Gabriel Knight 3) that they effectively committed suicide by driving away their own playerbase. The fact that many of these obtuse puzzles appeared to be pretexts to market strategy guides, "game help phone hotlines", and clue books to the same customers didn't help. It's telling that while adventure games have survived among indie studios, they've moved away from these kinds of puzzles, drawing inspiration from Visual Novels and are much more story-driven.
  • Ben Croshaw (who has created a number of adventure games himself, most notably the Chzo Mythos) postulated that the adventure game genre was killed by advancements in technology. The inventory-management puzzle was a simple vehicle to drive gameplay and lengthen content that didn't consume much in the way of processing power, which made it easy for games like King's Quest or Monkey Island to squeeze in high-quality visuals and storytelling for their time. This was especially notable when many adventure games were computer-based, which gave them a niche over consoles. When technology evolved to the point that games could fit both decent faster-paced gameplay and decent visuals and story, and developers created or codified other dedicated genres like Real-Time Strategy (Dune II) and First-Person Shooter (Wolfenstein 3-D and especially Doom, which still has a fair number of classic adventure game fans who dislike it on this principle), adventure games suffered badly by comparison by suddenly appearing much less advanced.
  • Telltale Games reinvigorated the genre with episodic decision-and-story-focused adventure games like The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us, though at the cost of decreased production on traditional moon-logic style adventure games like Sam and Max. Which was fine, until they went so far with it that they oversaturated the genre with Strictly Formula releases differing only in the license involved and ultimately torpedoed themselves in 2018. The genre they revived remains relatively strong, with entries like Until Dawn, A Plague Tale: Innocence, and the Life Is Strange franchise continuing to carry the torch.
• The Interactive Movie genre, which emerged in the 80s and saw a ton of notable releases in the 90s, died out due largely to the advancing technology of consoles like the PlayStation and the CD format becoming nigh-universal outside of the Nintendo 64. Much of what made those early games notable was that little could match them graphically, but when you could fit lavish prerendered or pre-filmed cutscenes into a game and still have the space for more substantive game design, they quickly became rather obsolete. It certainly didn't help that, unless you were Dragon's Lair or Tex Murphy, the common judgment of interactive movies was that the "movie" part was So Bad, It's Good at best. Interactive Fiction has seen a rise since then, but the classical "watching a live-action sequence while you occasionally press buttons" format is extremely rare outside of indie titles. An attempt to revive the genre with Enix's game Love Story for the then-brand new PlayStation 2 flopped hard and the genre stayed buried ever since. FMV games would make a surprising resurgence in the New 10's, but operate more as "choose your own adventure" stories, without trying to bring back the Press X to Not Die aspects of their predecessors.
• Resident Evil 4, while highly successful and acclaimed both in its time and now, has been blamed for killing, or at least hastening the demise of, the Survival Horror genre in the '00s. This is largely due to its status as the Franchise Original Sin for the Resident Evil series, introducing many shooter-esque gameplay elements that would take over later games in the series, which other survival horror series would copy until, by The New '10s, most "horror" games were basically action shooters with creepy-crawlies and gothic atmospheres. However, the seventh and eighth games, as well as P.T. (albeit its full game being canned) and several indie productions (notably Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Outlast) have formed a movement of harkening back to the genre's roots, and even Resident Evil 4's own remake heavily plays up the horror aspects of the original while deemphasizing the campy "action movie" elements.
• As mentioned in the trope description, Street Fighter II codified so many tropes that most people don't even realize how utterly it killed off any Fighting Game, especially 2D ones, that didn't largely adhere to them.^note It got to the point that Capcom famously sued Data East over their Fighter's History game, which they saw as plagiarism of SFII, but Capcom lost simply because the ripped-off elements were considered scenes a faire (i.e. commonplace to the genre - emphasis ours) by the time it came out. Game mechanics we take for granted nowadays such as being able to attack before completing a walk cycle, having all of your basic moves available from the outset, lack of stage obstacles or crowd interference, or even just being able to jump high into the air, weren't always standard features of fighting games. Today, it's considered noteworthy if a fighting game breaks just two or three of the rules that SFII placed down, such as Bloodstorm, Divekick, and ARMS.
• Traditional base-building Real-Time Strategy games were killed by a pair of independent factors:
  • The more immediate hit was the success of Relic's Company of Heroes, which popularized RTS games with less focus on strategy, base-building, and long-term resource management and more on micro-management and unit survival (typically referred to as a "Real Time Tactics" game), and then Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II, which shifted even further away from the traditional RTS formula by, for instance, removing base-building entirely. This directly led to EA meddling in the development of Command & Conquer. Namely, they first mandated the creation of a Gaiden Game aimed at Asian markets and internet cafes in particular, in the RTT mold, then partway through said game's development, decided to make it the Grand Finale for the first and most iconic universe of Command & Conquer, one of the progenitors of the classic base-building RTS, rebranding the game Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight. When this inevitably flopped, EA pulled the rug out from under the entire franchise's feet, blaming a "lack of interest in RTS games" (despite that what they released was not one), thus removing one of the two main series from the competition. Meanwhile, Blizzard had left their own followup RTS after the well-received Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos sit on the backburner for over a decade, instead chasing its own much more successful MMO spinoff, with the only acknowledgement of the RTS series in fifteen years being an HD remake of Warcraft III that, to put it lightly, wasn't well-received either. With effectively no big-name triple-A titles and publicity, the entire genre sunk into relative obscurity, shrinking its market.
  • The other hit took longer for its effects to be noticeable, but did more permanent damage - and, ironically, it was the release of one of the most preeminent games in the genre, the aforementioned Warcraft III, which came with a robust map editor that lead to the invention of the Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. While early MOBA-like concepts appeared in the StarCraft custom map "Aeon of Strife," Warcraft's addition of RPG Elements like hero XP and items codified the fledgling genre. Defense of the Ancients became so popular that it spawned an entire new genre emphasizing micromanaging and tactics. As a result, the traditional RTS largely evaporated; in The New '10s, with the end of both of the traditional RTS genre's progenitors (Command & Conquer only seeing one failed attempt at a new game after the aforementioned C&C4, Warcraft having long since shifted focus to the more popular and lucrative World of Warcraft) and the rise of League of Legends and Dota 2 (which was the most popular game on Steam for close to five years), outside of the three parts of StarCraft II the only traditional RTS releases of note have been HD remakes of the genre's progenitors and the very rare retraux game in their style.
• The day that Rise of the Robots was released is often cited as the moment when British gaming journalism died out. It was difficult before due to the massive oversaturation of video game magazines, which meant that they were all about hyping up the public for whatever game that would hit the store shelves, even if it was pretty bad, so that they could get review copies before anyone else. When a game that was outright horrible, led by the major gaming studio Time Warner Interactive, hit the store shelves, all British magazines that could make a review the day it came out were giving it high scores (Computer and Video Games rated it even as high as 92%) to be able to review the game before any other magazine across the country could get their hands on it, resulting in the game selling massive amounts of copies due to critics being unable to say anything even remotely negative about the game as that would mean that they would receive their review copies at a later date (Amiga Power, who gave the game a 5%, only got the game days after its release, and didn't get a review out until two months later in the January '95 issue). After most readers realized that most magazines they were reading were saying that they should buy horrible products, you can expect that most readers stopped caring about what they had to say, resulting in the demise of many of them.
• Pokémon, for various reasons, has dominated the Mon genre so strongly it has made it very difficult for any other works in the genre to achieve mainstream popularity or sometimes even get made at all. Some are even accused of copying Pokémon, like Digimon is from the mere name, due to the public's lack of awareness that it's a genre that existed before Pokémon, not something pioneered by it.
  • Averted with Yo-kai Watch, which has quickly become a massive competitor to the Pokémon games, both of them leading weekly sales charts for months after they come out and has created a comparably large multimedia and merchandising empire — in Japan. Outside of Japan, however, this is closer to a straight example where, while managing to avoid accusations and the resulting stigma of being a Pokémon ripoff, Yo-Kai Watch has failed to gain any popularity above a Cult Classic, especially in North America.
  • Another gaming aversion is the Fate side of the Nasuverse. As the core premise of the setting is seven Masters and Servants — superpowered mythological and historical heroes at the Master's beck and call — fighting for a wish from the Holy Grail, part of the reason it even got off the ground was because a.) it started life as an Eroge Visual Novel, and b.) when allowed to stand on its own non-porny merits, it quickly broke a lot of perceived stereotypes with the Mon element being less Monsters so much as an assortment of waifus and husbandos, allowing it to shake off the "Pokémon clone" stigma... and even then, it is STILL largely relegated to Japan, only coming stateside very rarely and not having the sheer international presence of Pokémon, despite being a cultural phenomenon back in Japan.
  • Another surprise aversion to this would be Palworld, whose entire existence and success is owed to Refuge in Audacity. It figured out that if you took advantage of the "Pokémon clone" stigma by having a clear copy-cat series of Pokémon mixed with the Third-Person Shooter and survival-crafting genre as well as show copious amounts of inflicted Black Comedy on the Ridiculously Cute Critters, it would gain enough attention through sheer shock value to get people to try it out... and it succeeded as well as it possibly could have, selling 25 Million in the first month (to give you an idea how insane this is, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet is the third best selling Pokémon games, and it sold 24 million by the end of the year). There's a lot of other factors at play, such as the Broken Base spawned from the perceived Sequelitis of Pokémon, and it's hard to predict if those numbers will be sustainable, but it's nonetheless an extremely impressive feat regardless and sadly the exception that proves the rule.
  • The only other gaming aversion would be the Shin Megami Tensei series and most of its spinoffs, which predated Pokémon and is considered the first successful franchise to use Mons, even if it looks like a deconstruction compared to Pokémon. Another factor of its success was due to simply not fitting into the "Pokémon clone" stigma by virtue of being less cute, cuddly Mon creatures with Pokémon Speak that you catch to collect yourself, so much as mythological demons from all religions and legends that you make pacts with to act as your familiars and regularly dispose of to fuse into stronger demons. Combine that with Shin Megami Tensei having heaps of ethical analysis of its three alignments with Grey-and-Gray Morality and lavishly-detailed research of its myths, and the contrast it has to Pokémon's Black-and-White Morality and emphasis on The Power of Friendship, it's probably the biggest reason why Shin Megami Tensei is even allowed to exist inside the public international consciousness as a Mons Series. Outside of Pokémon, Yo-kai Watch, Fate, Palworld, and Shin Megami Tensei, however, successful video game Mons series are few and far between and not known by most.
• The arcade racing genre suffered a decline in popularity and variety during the seventh generation of consoles, thanks to the commercial failures of Blur and Split/Second (2010) (both of which lead to the dissolution of their studios) as the industry shifted towards realism and how many licenses they could get, which led to the dominance of Forza and Gran Turismo as the go-to racing games backed heavily by real life racing teams using the aforementioned games as training simulations. In the eighth generation, only the fan favorite Mario Kart, the free-to-play Asphalt series, and the long-running Need for Speed series remain active.
• In addition to its effects on any continuance of its RTS predecessors, World of Warcraft destroyed the modern market for MMORPGs. The success and long-lasting nature of the game meant that almost every MMO that came out after directly aimed to be a "WoW Killer" — many trying to copy it outright, at that, and not making enough attempt to differentiate itself from WoW (there's only so many times you can do a fantasy setting with a war between humans and orcs before it becomes stale) - and, not understanding the kind of commitment needed to match a game that's lasted that long (MMOs thrive on community and volume of content, both of which favor the older and more entrenched game) and generated that much money, ended up destroying itself in the process. Very few MMOs, especially subscription-based ones, have managed to last in this era, with many either closing down only a few years later, or existing in dumbed-down and/or free-to-play states to attract a small audience and make some of their losses back. The only big subscription-based game to truly last as a rival to World of Warcraft is Final Fantasy XIV, which itself had a host of problems at the beginning due to an attempt to compete with WoW causing its release to be rushed, and has only stayed as strong as it has due to a combination of its name-brand recognition letting it last long enough to begin extensive work on fixing its problems, rather than immediately cutting its losses and running, and actual effort put into both its content and overall quality.
• While motion-controlled minigame collections struggled to win over hardcore gamers from the get-go, they at least generally sold very well for most of the seventh console generation. Kinect Star Wars, however, is in retrospect widely seen as the game that put the genre beyond the point of no return. Heavily hyped up as the Killer App for the Xbox 360's Kinect add-on, the game received a massive backlash when it turned out to be yet another collection of cheesy, poorly-designed minigames, implemented in a way that was seen by many to be outright insulting to the franchise, and was the point where even most casual gamers finally realized the genre was never going to significantly evolve; one of the games in particular, a Dance Central clone that had Star Wars characters dancing to terrible covers of popular music rewritten to be about the franchise, became an emblem of how bad an idea the game was. Microsoft tried to persevere with the Kinect 2.0 that was initially included with the Xbox One, but both the add-on and the motion-controlled game genre in general were widely seen as dead-on-arrival by the time the console launched, contributing to its early struggles. Games with motion controls as optional extras remain a thing to this day, but even Nintendo, who popularized the genre, have to date only bothered releasing a very small number of titles based entirely around motion controls (most prominently ARMS, 1-2-Switch, and Nintendo Switch Sports) on the Nintendo Switch, and even then, all three of the aforementioned games struggled (the first was cannibalized by Splatoon 2 and thus ended up a Stillborn Franchise, the second had its sequel test so poorly Nintendo contemplated cancelling it entirely before unceremoniously releasing it, and the third was hit with a massive backlash by long-time Wii Sports fans).
• Disco Elysium gives us an In-Universe example. Encyclopedia, the Exposition Fairy skill, will mention in an off-hand comment that Disco in hindsight died as music genre in the year of '38, and what was considered the death-knell was when the single "Et Puis Du Sang" failed to crack the International Top 20. The fact that '38 was the same year where a major scandal surrounding Disco superstar Guillaume le Million and his accidental death from Erotic Asphyxiation rocked the music industry probably also played a role.
• Donkey Kong 64 is so bloated that it killed off the Collect-a-Thon Platformer genre. While this specific game went way overboard with the collecting aspect^note The game's Gotta Catch Them All mechanic is seen as a rather notorious example of Padding, especially some objects can only be picked up by certain Kongs for seemingly rather arbitrary reasons, which necessitates the player to frequently switch characters, which again is only something that be done in certain locations, if they want to accomplish it. Making things even worse is how often it happens that collectibles for one character will be hidden behind a door that only another character can open, so you can't even just scour the whole level one time each per character. Even if you are not going for 101% Completion, it is still rather time consuming to even get to the point where the Final Boss is unlocked., the genre became extremely over saturated and cliche, turning people off the already tired trend as a result. It often got overused in lazily designed platformer games, particularly licensed ones, helping send the trend to an early grave. Even the Mario games, which kicked off the trend in the first place with Super Mario 64, gradually shifted towards more standard platforming experiences with the Super Mario Galaxy, fully abandoning it come Super Mario 3D Land. It would take until the late 2010s until the genre found its footing again, between throwback entries like A Hat in Time and Yooka-Laylee, as well as Mario itself taking another crack at the formula to thunderous success in Super Mario Odyssey.
• The phenomenal success of Ace Combat series that had set high expectations for the genre, alongside the collapse of H.A.W.X. and Air Force Delta series and the death of arcade scene resulted in the demise of arcade-style combat flight simulator games that isn’t Ace Combat with recent combat flight simulator games have pointedly moved back to its roots of being more focused on realism that the combat flight simulators was originally intended. The only games with arcade-style focus of combat flight simulator, but with explicit intention to appreciate the success of Ace Combat are the failed Vector Thrust and the relatively successful Project Wingman.

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