KUnlimited
Since: Sep, 2020
#202: Dec 20th 2020 at 2:34:43 AM
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
If I remember correctly, the Kaos Studios entry was removed from the main page before, because "being located in an expensive city" is not a Creator Killer.
![[down]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_down.png "[down]"){kind=icon}
Thanks.
Edited by KUnlimited on Dec 20th 2020 at 7:05:39 AM
Avatar by Butterscotch Arts. Used under license.
Packer
Since: Aug, 2013
#203: Dec 20th 2020 at 6:33:14 AM
- Paradigm Entertainment: While the company closed a year after Stuntman: Ignition was released, the game not meeting expectations was a factor in THQ shutting the studio down from what I've looked into. Keep.
- Kaos Studios: KUnlimited gave a valid point. Cut.
- THQ: Since the company has been revived, I'm not sure if this entry qualifies. Wikipedia has the original THQ and THQ Nordic as separate entities but are they separate enough? More input from others needed.
themayorofsimpleton
Now a lurker. Thanks for everything. | he/him
from Elsewhere
(Experienced, Not Yet Jaded)
Relationship Status: Abstaining
Now a lurker. Thanks for everything. | he/him
#204: Dec 20th 2020 at 7:20:32 AM
I think THQ and THQ Nordic are separate enough personally, FWIW.
AmourMitts
Since: Jan, 2016
#205: Dec 20th 2020 at 4:48:30 PM
I have a couple of examples related to the ones cut from the actual trope page...
- Franchise Killer: The show's cancellation due to its Troubled Production caused the end of the era of this Schneiderverse that dates back to The Amanda Show and includes Drake & Josh and Zoey 101, and even arguably all the way back to All That (all of the shows were connected by at least one recurring actor or actress).
- Franchise Killer: The double bill of the TV show bombing and Disney buying 20th Century Fox (and therefore the X-Men and Fantastic Four movie rights) turned the comics version into a complete punchline. They'd been on pretty rocky ground beforehand, seen as a Creator's Pet and Replacement Scrappy, but it was at this point that Marvel basically gave up on their plans of turning them into a franchise to rival the lost Mutants, and titles started dropping across the board, culminating in a story literally entitled Death of the Inhumans (although most of the deaths in that series were of secondary characters). Ms. Marvel and Moon Girl seem to be surviving well enough, though, owing to them being at best distant from the series. In terms of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, some fans remain cautiously-optimistic for an eventual reboot that ignores the show entirely, given Kevin Feige's interest in bringing Kamala Khan into the setting, the increasing importance of the Kree to the MCU, and the inevitable Fantastic Four reboot potentially opening the door for Inhumans, but such hopes seem like a pipe-dream in the immediate aftermath of the failure of the television series.
Maintenance?
#206: Dec 20th 2020 at 4:51:36 PM
First is not a franchise; second appears to be a non-work killer. Cut both.
Musician/Composer
#207: Dec 20th 2020 at 11:44:36 PM
As for the other developers from the Video Games page, this is going to be a long list, but here goes. This is the first part.
Other Publishers and Developers (Part 1)
- Duke Nukem Forever nearly killed 3D Realms and destroyed George Broussard's reputation without even being made, or more accurately, by not being made. And just to twist the knife, after 3D Realms imploded, the game was handed to Gearbox Software by 2K Games, who only needed one year to finish where Broussard and his team had left off after twelve years in and out of development. According to Word of God, the game was already finished; Broussard's perfectionism and the Take-Two lawsuit were the primary factors that kept it from coming out anywhere close to on-time. 3D Realms would recover after being acquired by SDN Invest, but have since been publishing smaller projects.
- Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning was a modest hit for 38 Studios and Big Huge Games, selling just over 1 million copies since its release in February 2012, but this number was well short of the three million copies the game needed to sell in order to cover development and loan costs. As a result, 38 and BHG laid off their entire staff
a few months after the game's release, effectively dissolving both companies and killing a planned Amalur-based MMORPG (codenamed Copernicus) in its cradle.
- Not wanting to be outdone by Def Jam Icon, Def Jam Rapstar sold poorly, was the subject of several lawsuits, killed 4mm Games, harmed Autumn Games, and even hindered the development of Skullgirls, a game otherwise divorced from anything relevant to Def Jam.
- The twin flops of BMX XXX and Turok: Evolution killed Acclaim in 2004. The former not only garnered a lot of controversy due to its attempt at using sexual content to sell copies, but it angered Dave Mirra enough to sue them because he didn't want his name associated with it (it was originally an installment in the Dave Mirra BMX series, and Acclaim continued using Mirra's name on advertisements even after he asked them not to). The latter suffered from an awful Play Station 2 port, poor design decisions, and an infamously boneheaded "Name Your Kid Turok" marketing campaign. The company was briefly revived two years later on a smaller scale and In Name Only, to which their new online games received significant backlash for being bug-ridden. The retooled Acclaim was bought out by Playdom in May 2010, only to be acquired by Disney a few months later, effectively burying the Acclaim name a second time given Disney's aforementioned bad habit of shutting down newly acquired game studios. Ironically, Disney had published a Turok reboot from a different company just a couple of years before.
- While producing a glut of bad licensed games in the early 2000s no doubt contributed to the demise of Argonaut Games (yes, the same who made Star Fox for the SNES), the finishing blow came with the notoriously poor Catwoman (2004). It ultimately proved the final product developed under the Argonaut name, with the company going bankrupt a few months after it was released.
- Atari...
- ... struggled for years in the wake of The Great Video Game Crash Of 1983, which, along with an insider trading scandal and a general disrespect for programmers and driving them out of the firm, led to Warner Communications firing Atari boss Ray Kassar (who never worked in entertainment again), and then selling the developer. Atari was also floundering by the release of the 5200 (which was one of the things that led to the crash). Their later console, the Atari 7800, was in fact a low-budget console that was profitable but distant from the mainstream console business. The final two consoles published by them, the Atari Lynx and Atari Jaguar, were originally not even made by them, but by British game developer Epyx, who spent years developing both and allowed Atari to release them to the mass market. This was a shortsighted attempt by Atari to return to the console business, as a combination of incredibly difficult-to-develop-for architecture, shoddy build quality, an archaic controller design, and the inertia enjoyed by Nintendo and Sega, doomed the Jaguar to ultimate failure, and it turned out to be the straw that finally broke Atari's back. You may still see the Atari name today, but that's just for marketing purposes — Atari Corporation died with the Jaguar, and the name was bought by French publisher Infogrames as part of a push into the worldwide market.
- Atari's arcade division, which was retained by Warner and renamed Atari Games, continued to trudge along with the occasional arcade hit such as Gauntlet and San Francisco Rush until Midway Games purchased the company in 1996. When Midway exited the arcade business in 2001, the Atari Games unit, by then renamed Midway Games West, struggled to publish a successful home console title before bowing out with Dr. Muto, which got great reviews but bombed in sales. Not long after its release, Midway shuttered Midway Games West, putting the final nail in the original Atari's coffin.
- The new Atari's US branch have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in hopes of separating from their French parent in a revival attempt to be its own company again. Should it succeed, Atari plans to seek investments to grow in mobile and digital gaming markets in not just licensing Atari properties, but developing them as well. In addition, they are attempting to reenter the video game console market with a new console: the Atari VCS.
- Since 2015, Atari has begun a fire sale of many of its brands. For example, THQ acquired Alone in the Dark, while Humongous Entertainment was sold to Tommo.
- The failure of Fury, an MMORPG designed by Australian company Auran nearly brought down the entire company, and it forced them out of game development. They are now an extremely limited train simulator developer.
- Fledgling developer Big Red Button Entertainment started and nearly ended their career with Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric. The table scraps about the game's development cycle that have been gathered and pieced together illustrated total chaos behind the scenes, with many BRB staffers leaving or getting fired throughout and the game being constantly compromised from its original creation at the behest of multiple parties. Upon Rise of Lyric's release, critics and fans panned the game across the board (to date, it's the absolute worst reviewed Sonic game, with Metacritic and GameRankings Metascores even lower than Sonic 2006), costing Sega and BRB millions of dollars due to poor sales (the combined sales of Rise of Lyric and fellow Boom tie-in Shattered Crystal only reached 490,000 units worldwide, making it the poorest-selling Sonic game to date note ). While BRB has managed to avoid outright closure, the only games that they have announced to be in development are VR games.
- Black Hole Entertainment went out of business after developing Might and Magic Heroes VI. There was also an alleged falling out with publisher Ubisoft.
- Blue Fang Games, best known for the Zoo Tycoon series, saw their fortunes come to an end in 2009, when their contract with Microsoft expired. This resulted in the studio struggling with several mobile and social media games before finally closing up shop in 2011 after many of those games underwhelmed critics and gamers alike. Microsoft released a new Zoo Tycoon game on Xbox 360 and Xbox One in 2013 with Frontier Developments as the developer. A Windows 8 and Windows Phone app called Zoo Tycoon: Friends came out a year afterward, but was quickly closed due to server problems.
- Blue Omega Entertainment, a small film company from Maryland, was dismantled just one month after Damnation (their only video game release) flopped with critics.
- The back-to-back commercial failures of LawBreakers and Radical Heights killed Boss Key Productions, though it was the former game that did the real damage; in fact, Cliff Bleszinski admitted that Radical Heights was rushed out in a last-ditch attempt to recoup the losses from LawBreakers. Not too long after the studio's closure, Bleszinski announced his retirement from game development.
- While NieR has since been re-evaluated as a classic, at the time of its release it met an underwhelming reception that caused its developer Cavia to close and be absorbed into AQ Interactive, who in turn got bought out by Marvelous Entertainment. Eventually PlatinumGames got their hands on the NieR franchise, with its sequel NieR: Automata being a major Breakthrough Hit and Sleeper Hit for the Drakengard franchise and is considered to be one of the best games released in 2017.
- Check Six Studios and Equinoxe Digital Entertainment were two developers that worked together on Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly in 2002. That game's unfortunate quality killed both of them before they could even get off the ground, and Spyro: A Hero's Tail would be handled by Eurocom instead.
- Cinemaware Corporation went bankrupt when the Full Motion Video remake of It Came From The Desert for the TurboGrafx-CD went way over budget. While NEC's stake in the company helped ensure that the game was released, it would be many years before Cinemaware would be revived as an essentially new company.
- Cing, developer of adventure games such as Trace Memory and Hotel Dusk: Room 215 for the Nintendo DS, declared bankruptcy less than a year after the commercial failure of their Wii game Little King's Story, which was intended to be their big breakthrough on consoles.
- The Amiga CD32 was planned for American release by Commodore, but a patent dispute got in the way, and the company eventually filed for bankruptcy several months later, in part due to the lost (by law) sales.
- After the abysmal flop of Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness, which also managed to take Paramount's second Tomb Raider movie with it, Eidos made it so Core Design couldn't make any more Tomb Raider games. This led to Core's boss Jeremy Heath-Smith having to walk away from the developer with his tail between his legs, and Core would struggle with a few mediocre handheld games before being sold off to Rebellion and rebranded as "Rebellion Derby". They were promptly taken down after the release of the critically savaged Rogue Warrior.
- The mixed critical reviews and poor sales of the episodic title Watchmen: The End is Nigh resulted in Deadline Games filing for bankruptcy only two months after its first episode released. Their financial woes had been compounded by an inability to get publishers on-board with any of their other projects, which included a sequel to their earlier Total Overdose, a Bonnie and Clyde-inspired shooter called Faith and a .45, and a game based around the final days of drug lord Pablo Escobar.
- Dark Energy Digital formed out of the shadow of Blade Interactive (known pretty much only for their Snooker games) in 2007 after the creation of their Hydroengine. A game engine that boasted the most realistic water effects to date. To showcase their new engine they released the critically panned Hydrophobia. Originally planned to be an episodic title the devoplers scrambled to fix gameplay issues and updated the first episode with Hydrophobia Pure. When this still didn't get the sales needed the studio scraped the episodic nature of the game and instead completely remade the game again as Hydrophobia Prophecy but again the game didn't gain traction. The studio went back to making sports games with WSC Real 11: World Snooker Championship but by then the damage had been done and the studio couldn't support itself.
- The two-man development studio Digital Homicide was known for many low-quality releases on Steam, but none were more notorious than the 2014 release The Slaughtering Grounds, which received attention thanks to a scathing video review from Jim Sterling. Rather than take the criticism to heart, the duo attempted to sue Sterling for slander, a case which was eventually dismissed with prejudice; however, it was not this case, but another attempt at a spurious lawsuit that truly did them in. While the Sterling case was still ongoing, Digital Homicide attempted to sue several Steam users that had criticized their games and demanded that Valve reveal the users' identities. In response to this, Valve decided to end their shenanigans once and for all by delisting DH's entire game catalog and blacklisting them from the service. Their finances and reputation destroyed, DH dropped their Steam lawsuit and retreated to selling their games through smaller distribution services.
- The failure of One Must Fall Battlegrounds due to a host of design problems after seven years of development meant that its developers, Diversions Entertainment, were completely incapable of recouping losses and forced to close their doors after its abysmal performance.
- The failure of the 2-D fighting game Beast's Fury also permanently tarnished the reputation of its developer Evil Dog Productions, who were known for their online Flash games like Road of the Dead. The project — which was intended by Evil Dog's leader Ryhan Stevens as a Dueling Work to Skullgirls — fell apart right from its inception in 2013. It staggered through a Troubled Production rife with poor money management, Skewed Priorities, and underpaid voice actors and animators. The final nail in the coffin for Evil Dog, however, was how they publicly treated criticism like the devil. It reached the point where the developers were attacking users on the official Skullgirls forum Skullheart... one of which being Skullgirls' developer, Mike Z. Evil Dog quickly gained notoriety and scorn among the fighting game community, who would then refuse to support their crowdfunding campaigns. The developers — who were now ridden of any respect or support whatsoever from their fanbase — cancelled the game in 2016. In the wake of the game's dissolution, plenty of animators and voice actors gave insight regarding the drama behind the scenes, and — along with campaign backers — set out to expose Stevens' incompetence and demand refunds en masse.
- Developer FireForge Games, already dealing with outstanding debts to its partial owner Tencent and a lawsuit filed by Razer alleging money paid to them to create a MOBA was funneled into making a different MOBA for Tencent, ended up filing for bankruptcy only three days after the release of their critically panned tie-in video game for the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot.
- Lair is commonly thought to have killed Factor 5. While its direct financial impact is somewhat overstated (in fact, in a 2018 post-mortem, the company's president insisted Lair was eventually profitable), it did kill Factor 5's exclusive game agreement with Sony, which came back to bite Factor 5 in the ass when the publisher of an unannounced Superman game died and the company had no project to fall back on. The CEO, Achim Moller, liquidated all of the studio's assets and officially closed up shop in January 2011.
- Haze was a high-profile Play Station 3 flop which bankrupted its developer, Free Radical Design. The company managed to hold off a more permanent demise by selling themselves to Crytek and becoming Crytek UK. Crytek UK itself collapsed later in 2014 amid reports of employee backlash over Crytek not paying them adequately, as well as corporate restructuring that saw much of its staff being terminated and the Homefront series being sold to Deep Silver. This move may have also doomed a fourth TimeSplitters game.
- Before the rise of Madden NFL as the be-all and end-all of all pro football video games, Front Page Sports Football was the king of these games on PC. Its main selling points included thousands of stock plays, in-depth statistics, real-life NFL players (from the 1995 version onward), and customizable leagues that allowed players to manage their teams in what's now known as dynasty mode. But from the 1996 version onward, the game became buggier and buggier with each subsequent release; FPS Football 96, for instance, had one week of games taking TWO HOURS to simulate, and homogenized draft picks where the top pick would be similar in talent to the last pick in the first round. Front Page Sports parent Sierra's tendency to rush-release FPS Football titles was the root of it all, and when the series was rebranded as Sierra Sports NFL Football Pro in 1999, that game was so buggy it got recalled. Not long after, the planned 2000 version never released when Sierra closed four of its studios, Front Page Sports included, in a reorganization of the company.
- Gaslamp Games came out of nowhere in 2011 with Dungeons of Dredmor, a roguelike that is also an Affectionate Parody of the genre and of fantasy tropes. It was well received for being enjoyable by both casual and hardcore gamers and gained a few DLC and additional content, plus tons of mods by fans. Gaslamp's next game, Clockwork Empires, an ambitious strategy game, was released on Steam's Early Access in 2014, but something went wrong along the way. The game was finally released near the end of 2016, but in an Obvious Beta state and a while later it became clear that the developers abandoned the project and went silent on all media accounts. From what little transpired, it seems that some of them don't work at Gaslamp anymore and the company itself may now be just an empty shell.
- Advent Rising was meant to be part of a multimedia franchise which would include a trilogy of games (including one on the PSP), but its mixed critical reaction and poor sales spelled a quick end for GlyphX Games, the game-making subsidiary of the graphic designer studio GlyphX Inc.
- Poor sales of both the Terminator Salvation tie-in game and the 2009 Bionic Commando led to Square Enix doing what can only be described as "death by trolling" on GRIN's Final Fantasy XII spin-off project Fortress, killing the entire company. This eventually led to the creation of OVERKILL Software, best known for PAYDAY: The Heist and PAYDAY 2. Both games have references to GRIN and its demise (the character of "Wolf" in particular, voiced by and heavily based on one of the two founders, essentially went postal because his company died the same way GRIN did in reality), showing that there's still at least some bitterness remaining.
- GRIN Multimedia (not to be confused with the Bionic Commando Rearmed developer above) fell into bankruptcy following the commercial failure of its Kickstarted game project, Woolfe: The Red Hood Diaries. The property was later purchased by Rebellion, who promised to help the developers fulfill their Kickstarter reward obligations. It is still uncertain whether or not a second Woolfe chapter will be created to continue the story.
- GSC Game World, at least in the form that released S.T.A.L.K.E.R., was destroyed by the combination of the Troubled Production of making a proper sequel to that game and mounting financial difficulties that the company had been struggling with from the beginning of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2's development. Surprisingly enough, this actually wasn't enough to kill the game itself, as the remaining skeleton crew of developers kept working on the game even when they didn't receive any payment or financial compensation for several months. The game was only killed off officially about six months later in December 2011, as the former CEO of GSC, Sergei Grigorovich, who still held the license for the series, refused to allow the development of the game to continue. After several former employees went on to found Vostok Games (creating the Spiritual Successor Survarium) or join up with 4A Games (makers of Metro 2033) - as well as a brief controversy surrounding West-Games, another developer which had a few STALKER devs but overstated their importance to that game's development to gain credibility for a crowdsourcing attempt - Grigorovich reopened GSC Game World in 2014, releasing a sequel to/remake of Cossacks: European Wars in 2016 and announcing in May 2018 that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 was back in development.
Edited by gjjones on Dec 20th 2020 at 2:47:25 PM
He/His/Him. No matter who you are, always Be Yourself.
Packer
Since: Aug, 2013
#208: Dec 21st 2020 at 12:51:02 PM
Here we go...
- 3D Realms: The entry acknowledges that they still exist. As for George Broussard, well, this isn't Reputation Killer. Cut.
- 38 Studios / Big Huge Games: Appears valid but Big Huge Games managed to survive the ordeal and they still exist. Keep but edit the BHG part.
- 4mm Games: Also looks valid, though Autumn Games shouldn't be bolded as they still exist. Keep.
- Acclaim: While the first part looks valid, both titles came out in 2002 and Acclaim released other titles before they entered bankruptcy two years later. It does appear that poor sales of the games were a factor in their demise though they had other financial mishaps. The second part doesn't signal out a work that took them down, so it should either be taken out or shortened. Mixed.
- Argonaut Games: Appears valid. Keep.
- Atari: Okay, I'm not sure if consoles contribute as works. Even then, the cooperate history of Atari is complicated and it's hard to tell if the original company and Atari, SA are different entities. I need more input though it looks like a possible cut. As for Atari Games, since it's a separate company and the entry looks valid, it can stay. The last two points can go.
- Auran: The entry looks valid, except that the company technically still exists albeit in a limited capacity. Cut.
- Big Red Button Entertainment: They still exist and were responsible for that Friday the 13th game. Cut.
- Black Hole Entertainment: Looks valid from what I looked into. Keep.
- Blue Fang Games: Also looks valid, though I'm not sure if the stuff about Zoo Tycoon near the end needs to be there. Keep.
- Blue Omega Entertainment: Another valid entry. Keep.
- Boss Key Productions: Also valid. Keep.
- Cavia: Again, valid but I'd recommend cutting the last part regarding the NieR franchise. Keep.
- Check Six Studios / Equinoxe Digital Entertainment: Looks valid though this entry is better suited for One-Book Author, at least for the former. Keep regardless.
- Cinemaware Corporation: Seems valid. Keep.
- Cing: Little King's Story didn't sell too badly. Also, the company made two more games before going bankrupt. Cut.
- Commodore: Again, do consoles count as works? More input needed though it looks valid.
- Core Design: Technically, Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness sold well. It was the critical reception that caused Eidos to switch development studios. Also, Rogue Warrior was technically not a Rebellion (Derby) title, so I wouldn't single it out as the cause for the division's closure. Cut.
- Deadline Games: This one seems valid. Keep.
- Dark Energy Digital: Another valid entry. Keep.
- Digital Homicide: Amazingly, they still exist and getting into more shenanigans. Cut.
- Diversions Entertainment: Appears valid. Keep.
- Evil Dog Productions: I couldn't find any leads that suggest that the company is defunct. As it is, this entry seems premature. Cut.
- FireForge Games: Looks valid. Keep.
- Factor 5: The company reopened a few years back. Cut.
- Free Radical Design: The first part looks valid. The rest seems flimsy as the second iteration didn't have a work that took them down. Maybe that part could stay if it's necessary. Mixed.
- Front Page Sports: Looks like this entry is discussing a series, not a company. Cut.
- Gaslamp Games: I found confirmation that the company has shut down. That should give the example some clarity. Keep but rewrite.
- GlyphX Games: Appears valid though again, better suited for One-Book Author. Keep regardless.
- GRIN: Looks valid. Keep.
- GRIN Multimedia: Another valid entry. Keep.
- GSC Game World: The fact that the entry mentions that the company has reopened makes it a bit of a shoehorn. Cut.
Musician/Composer
#209: Dec 21st 2020 at 5:49:08 PM
He/His/Him. No matter who you are, always Be Yourself.
As for Part 2:
Other Developers and Publishers (Part 2)
- While High Voltage Software is still around as a developer of outsourced ports and the occasional licensed game, their run as a developer of original IP came to a screeching halt after a triple threat of a deal to work alongside Nintendo falling apart in explosive fashionnote , the very long (and very expensive) Development Hell that The Grinder ran into and never found its way out of, and Conduit 2 flopping and killing off its franchise in the process, leaving them with no other choice but to refocus their efforts on the porting side of the business.
- The Quiet Man became the undoing of Human Head Studios. Madison, Wisconsin-based Human Head Studios built its reputation with games like Rune and Prey (2006), but the 2010s proved to be difficult for the studio with flops like Brink! and Defiance. The studio thus shook things up by collaborating with Kensei Fujinaga from Square Enix to create an ambitious beat-em-up/FMV combination that would not be reliant on sound. Unfortunately for Human Head Studios, what resulted was an Obvious Beta that ended up as one of the worst-reviewed games of 2018. The studio attempted to go back to basics with a sequel to Rune, but its Troubled Production mixed with The Quiet Man's critical and financial failure led to the studio's closure. Fortunately, no one lost their jobs as Bethesda created a new studio in Madison and gave everyone at Human Head a position there.
- Famously in the UK (thanks to coverage from The BBC), the development of the "mega-games" Psyclapse and Bandersnatch brought down Imagine Software in 1983, one of the biggest and most successful software companies of the day. It was compounded by how the company was spending silly money on advertising, bad investments and badly thought-out attempts to outwit their rivals by buying up all available duplicating capacity. However, former employee Bruce Everiss, upon becoming an Orwellian Editor, would rather make you think piracy killed Imagine instead of incompetence (in spite of having acknowledged the true causes of its downfall himself in 1984).
- Indie Built, formerly Access Games, known for the Tex Murphy detective game series and the Amped snowboarding games, became one of the first casualties of the seventh console generation, shutting its doors in April 2006, a few months after Amped 3 severely underperformed.
- Ion Storm:
- The Dallas office suffered from the one-two punch of the failure of Dominion: Storm over Gift 3, which was rushed out as quickly as possible to gain more cash for/stop taking resources away from Daikatana, which basically killed any goodwill or respect the team once had. They were able to put out a third game, Anachronox, but its founders would leave and the office would be closed within days of its release.
- The other office in Austin folded under much less dramatic circumstances: the company's six-game contract with Eidos just happened to be complete after the release of Thief: Deadly Shadows, so Warren Spector and several other senior staff members resigned once it was complete.
- As detailed in this French video dealing with the twilight years of Irem, Super R-Type ended up killing Irem's USA division. The division massively overproduced the game, expecting it to sell "at least 250,000 copies" due to being a North American launch title for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. In the end, 300,000 copies were produced, but only 50,000 were actually sold.
- Despite its critical and commercial success, the strenuous development of BioShock Infinite caused Ken Levine to walk away from Irrational Games, shutting it down and restructuring it into a heavily scaled-back studio called Ghost Story Games that would focus on smaller-scale stories as opposed to expansive AAA titles like the BioShock series.
- Kabam Beijing was closed after Legacy of Zeus performed poorly.
- While somewhat respected for their story-driven games and the success of The Wheel of Time, Legend Entertainment's demise came with their involvement in Epic Games's Unreal series. The Expansion Pack Unreal Mission Pack: Return to Na Pali had annoying intermission segments which broke the action the original game was known for, as well as elements of A Space Marine Is You. The fatal blow came, however, with Unreal II: The Awakening, a generic shooter with the Unreal name thrown in and the Skaarj being put as enemies as their only links to the series.
- LJN struggled to stay afloat following their toy division's collapse in 1990, releasing one disastrous licensed video game after another, with the most high-profile flops being the Back To The Future tie-in games for the Nintendo Entertainment System. The last straw, however, came with the tie-in game for Spider-Man: The Animated Series for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and the Sega Genesis, which was criticized for lackluster sound effects, an overused storyline, unimpressive graphics, difficult gameplay and (in the case of the Super NES port) limited variety of villains and action moves Spider-Man could use. The brand, which was already being stained by the above problems, was removed from the Genesis port in favor of then-parent Acclaim to hide the fact that LJN was involved in the game's development, and both the tarnished reputation of LJN and poor sales sent the entire company to its mercy. Acclaim, who had bought the toymaker from MCA, finally closed LJN shortly after the publication of the game, and then revived the brand one more time for the Dreamcast racing game Spirit of Speed '37 in 2000; it was so poorly received that many people are convinced it was done to protect Acclaim's image. LJN would have probably been all but forgotten after this point if the Angry Video Game Nerd hadn't dusted off one of their games for his YouTube debut, with the company becoming a recurring feature in his videos.
- The commercial failure of both Yo-kai Watch 3 and The Snack World: The Dungeon Crawl - Gold in the West led to Level-5 shutting down both Level-5 International America and Level-5 Abby, two studios that were responible for localizing its titles outside Japan. This could potentally mean that any future Level-5 game would suffer from No Export for You unless the company could find a Third Party pubisher.
- While controller manufacturer Mad Catz had already been slowly sinking in the late 2000s and early 2010s thanks to console manufacturers locking out the wireless protocols used to connect controllers, relegating them to the increasingly marginalised field of wired controllers, they were ultimately finished off by the costs involved in helping to create Rock Band 4, which severely undersold compared to expectations.
- The piss-poor Empire Earth 3 led to not only the death of the franchise, but also Mad Doc Software. Less than a year later, they were acquired by Take-Two Interactive and renamed "Rockstar New England".
- Doctor Who and the Mines of Terror was the last game released by Micro Power. The expense of developing a game bigger than any of Micro Power's previous titles across four platforms (including the never-finished ZX Spectrum version), combined with the costs of licensing Doctor Who and producing the special memory cartridge required by the BBC Micro version surely contributed to the company's demise.
- Midway Games, who in the '80s and '90s was a dominant force in arcade games with the Mortal Kombat, Cruis'n and NBA Jam series, struggled to reverse their declining fortunes in the mid-2000s and eventually bought the publishing rights to Unreal Tournament III, which Midway viewed as its last effort to survive despite having no involvement in development (Unreal creator Epic Games did the work). Although the game was favorably reviewed and sold 1 million copies, it was far below the sales of its predecessor, Unreal Tournament 2004 (which was published by Atari); this was systemic of the company grappling with under-performing software sales, which disillusioned investors on the company's ability to reform itself and reverse their fortunes. Midway was also reeling from the decline of the arcade industry during this decade, which burned holes in the company's finances and prompted them to shut down its bread-and-butter arcade division to stave off further losses. The company being expelled from the New York Stock Exchange would permanently seal its fate: despite the success of Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe a year later, the damage was done; the once-proud developer went bankrupt in 2009, and sold a majority of its assets (including the Mortal Kombat series) to Warner Bros..
- Mirage Technologies closed after Rise of the Robots and its sequel underwhelmed critics and audiences alike. While the graphics looked amazing for their time, everything else surrounding the games was a hot mess.
- In 1994, Motown Records established their own video game company, but only released two games: Bébé's Kids and Rap Jam: Volume One. Both games were critical disasters, and Motown Software lasted only 3 years before shutting down. That said, Bebe's Kids developer Radical Entertainment survived and went on to develop several more games.
- The Neverhood, creators of the self-titled The Neverhood and Skullmonkeys, closed up shop following the critical and commercial failure of BoomBots.
- nStigate Games (formerly Nihilistic Software) saw its future in console and handheld game development come to an end after the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops: Declassified. While the company changed its name and announced its intent to move to the mobile gaming sector just before Declassified was released, the scathing reviews the game received ensured the move would never come to pass, as the company shut down before it could release anything under the nStigate moniker.
- Omni Games was brought down by a lawsuit from Konami in 1982 due to the fact that they'd stolen sprites and sounds from the Konami game Scramble for a Mockbuster game called Scramble 2. The landmark ruling made it law that sprites and sounds counted as copyrighted, even if the source code is different. Hideo Kojima found the incident amusing enough to reference twice - in Snatcher, the building where the protagonist works is called "the Konami-Omni building", and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake mentions that the Zanzibar Land tank force is made up of a collaboration between "Chrysler, General Water and Omni Corporation".
- Over Fence, the developers of Flip Wars, filed for bankruptcy after the game flopped.
- MechWarrior Online forever sullied Piranha Games's reputation; while the game itself was mostly decent at release, PGI's numerous public relations disasters — effectively cease-and-desisting the officially licensed Mechwarrior Living Legends note , adding controversial content to MWO that they promised would be left out, and getting themselves banned from Reddit for trying to seize control of subreddits — excessive monetization, and delays made players extremely wary of them. When PGI launched a crowdfunding campaign for Transverse, a suspiciously similar looking game to Star Citizen, the campaign flopped hilariously despite heavy promotion on the MWO website and sponsored ads; it only managed to get 2% of its $500,000 funding goal after a month, and that was after they dropped it from $1,000,000. The game's former publisher, Infinity Games Publishing, kicked the bucket shortly after PGI went independent; their only other published game, Mechwarrior Tactics, was a cash sink and killed them due to incompetent management and multiple developer switches. Beta versions of the game were sold on the website, which left early access players without refunds or servers to play on.
- Pi Studios was once one of the developers under publisher Activision's label, where they primarily assisted other developers, particularly in the Call of Duty series where they assisted with the development of United Offensive, 3, and World at War, as well as other work outside of Activision such as previous-gen versions of or spinoffs from the Rock Band series and Mercenaries 2... then they took a heavy hit after working on the Misbegotten Multiplayer Mode from the 2009 Wolfenstein, the result of which was Activision eventually dropping them.
Despite this, Pi Studios held on as a developer, and were soon planning to bounce back with one of their first unique titles: Bonk: Brink of Extinction, what was to be the first full game in the Bonk series in more than fifteen years, wherein Bonk was to attempt to save his world from the threat of an incoming meteor. Alas, it was not to be, as development was brought to a screeching halt following the 2011 Fukushima disaster. The game was cancelled on March 23rd of that year, and Pi Studios was just as dead as Bonk before the month was over - several of its employees went on to form Category 6 Studios, a developer that announced one game and then dropped off the map.- The cancellation of Brink of Extinction may have also proven to be the last straw for publisher Hudson Soft, who had been slowly losing relevance as a developer over the course of the 2000s following a series of flops like Bomberman Act:Zero and Lost in Shadow; just a month after the cancellation, they would be a wholly-owned subsidary of Konami, and would be shut down early the next March.
- The poor sales and critical reception of Conflict: Denied Ops caused the closure of series creator Pivotal Games after owner Eidos failed to find a buyer for the studio.
- The RDI Halcyon, noted for being the poorest selling console ever at only 13 units, bankrupted RDI Video Systems.
- Losses from the critically panned All Points Bulletin killed Crackdown developer Realtime Worlds. They sank a lot of money in the long development phase but in the end, they had to release the game as-is in hopes of recouping their losses. Unfortunately, it was still in a messy state and rather accelerated their downfall — the servers were shut down less than ten weeks after the launch, a sad new record for an MMO.
- Although its original incarnation died a quick death, APB was successfully revived as a free-to-play title, with the rights being picked up by GamersFirst and the game rebranded as "APB Reloaded". To put RTW's downfall in perspective: the initial incarnation of the game cost $120 million to develop, but GamersFirst was able to secure the rights to the property for a mere $2 million, allowing them to easily make Reloaded profitable.
- Ritual Entertainment had its fate sealed by the underperformance of their attempt to make an episodic sequel to their 1998 game SiN - while the first episode, Emergence, sold well enough to recoup its own development costs, it didn't sell well enough to fund the development for the eight further episodes they had planned. One year later they would be absorbed into the casual games developer MumboJumbo, though some former devs would leave shortly after that merger to work at id Software or found Escalation Studios (now Bethesda Game Studios Dallas).
- Rooster Teeth Games had itself done in by the first-person shooter Vicious Cycle. Rooster Teeth co-founder Geoff Ramsay revealed that the game was way too niche, especially in its corner of the industry and that, with their other failures, they've decided to shutter that portion of the company and leave the entire Vicious Cycle game as a completely free-to-play game.
- Sigma Enterprises, a Japanese company that was part of the industry since 1978, had its video game business done in by 1992's Maka Maka, a Super Famicom JRPG that took so much time and money to make that Sigma rushed the game to stores to make its scheduled release date the moment they received an untested prototype. The resulting Obvious Beta became notorious as a kusogē in Japan, and the company published three more arcade games the following year before ceasing game production altogether.
- Silicon Knights was once renowned for its work on the Nintendo Game Cube cult classics Eternal Darkness and Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes. However, once CEO Denis Dyack broke from Nintendo, his ego got the better of him with Too Human, and a disputed case of Executive Meddling* plagued X-Men: Destiny. These incidents, along with a comprehensive loss in a dispute with Epic Games (wherein Silicon Knights was caught plagiarizing Unreal Engine 3 code for use in its own projects), ruined the studio and Dyack's reputation, as evidenced by a unsuccessful 2013 bid to secure funding for a Spiritual Sequel to Eternal Darkness from crowdfunding services such as Kickstarter.
- Skip Ltd. has been completely silent since the critical and commercial drubbing of Chibi-Robo!: Zip Lash in 2015, which executives even claimed would be the last game in the series if it bombed. What little news to come out of the company since then implies that they've disbanded.
- Spark Unlimited's development history consisted of a string of mediocre games, with its lone bright spot being Lost Planet 3 (while the game sold poorly, it received praise for its story). The company's collaboration with Comcept and Koei Tecmo, Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z, also flopped, and Spark disbanded a year later.
- Starbreeze Studios was a studio famous for their The Chronicles of Riddick video game adaptations, Escape from Butcher Bay and Assault on Dark Athena, as well as the first video game adaptation of The Darkness, which are regarded as some of the greatest licensed games of all time. However, after the failure of the 2012 Syndicate reboot, the company got into financial troubles and most of the experienced workforce left to form MachineGames and began work on Wolfenstein: The New Order. Later in the same year, it was announced that Starbreeze had bought Overkill Software, the developers of PAYDAY: The Heist, which was now its subsidiary. While this was technically true, in reality, it was effectively the other way around: Overkill's leadership had bought most of Starbreeze's stocks and all but absorbed the company into Overkill. The remaining development team on Starbreeze would work on the much-loved indie title, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, whose developers would also leave the company soon after the game saw success. While it still technically exists, what currently remains of Starbreeze is little more than Overkill's publishing arm.
- Starbreeze Studios had massive success with publishing PAYDAY 2, but the studio made quite a number of boneheaded moves thereafter. The game, over the span of a few years, gained a ton of DLC that were mostly weapons and weapon skins, which didn't make the fans happy and had them accuse the studio of being greedy. The addition of safes were also met with disdain, since they were basically loot boxes that the devs had promised they would not add to the game. The constant addition of big name celebrity cameos in promotions and related DLC had many people point out that Starbreeze was spending money that was basically turning the game into advertisement that the fans were paying for with all the DLC. At the same time, Starbreeze had a Troubled Production with Overkill's The Walking Dead, which was a buggy mess and was rushed out the door. It sold so poorly (and was of such poor quality) that the license holders for The Walking Dead brand terminated their contract with Starbreeze, which caused the game's console ports to be canned and the PC version to be pulled from sale. Likewise, the studio helped make RAID: World War II, which was met with mixed reviews and most people saying that the game was just a sub-par PAYDAY clone set in WWII. An attempt to become a leader in the Virtual Reality business with "Star VR" flopped despite heavy investment. On top of everything else, Starbreeze was hit with investigations over insider trading and poor working environments for the developers. The CEO was fired, and the business nearly folded entirely in early 2019. The future of Starbreeze remains uncertain and most people believe PAYDAY 2 was the only good thing to have come out of Starbreeze. In October 2019, after nearly a year of restructuring (including selling off most of their assets and publishing deals), Starbreeze announced that they would be returning to PAYDAY 2 (a year after the game's support had officially ended), to create new content (both free and paid DLC) in the hopes of earning enough money to fund development of PAYDAY 3. As of December 2019, the company is out of immediate danger due to a successful reconstruction process, but is not completely out of the woods as it has until the end of 2024 to play off its debts.
- Short-lived Macintosh software company Storm Impact had two hits right out of the gate with the RPG TaskMaker and the skiing game MacSki in the mid-1990s. While their next products (a space game called Asterbamm and a tech support utility called Technical Snapshot) bombed, the company soldiered on for a while with updates to their two flagship products. The major factor in their demise was undercapitalization; the company consisted mainly of two people, thus making it hard for them to keep up with development in the computer video game industry. Making matters worse were a 1997 lawsuit against a software-of-the-month company that distributed their games illegally (they won the lawsuit, but it ate up so much of their resources), a decline in the Mac market at the time, and issues with a publisher who kept losing orders. In 1998, they barely managed to rush out The Tomb of the TaskMaker before the company went under entirely.
- Tale of Tales, developer of art games like The Path, tried to attract a wider audience with the 2015 game Sunset. Sadly, this backfired. Despite general critical acclaim (compare Metacritic's 70 Metascore versus the 2.7 user score on the same site), it sold poorly enough that they went out of business not long after release. Not helping matters was the Creator Breakdown that ensued on Twitter, including a Cluster F-Bomb lashing out against games, gamers, and the industry as a whole.
- Despite winning critical acclaim and millions of sales, L.A. Noire killed developer Team Bondi. The excruciatingly long development (publisher Rockstar Games eventually had to bring in their other studios to help finish it), coupled with employees furious about borderline-sweatshop working conditions and not being named in the credits, soured their relationship with Rockstar and killed any chance of them finding another publisher. Shortly thereafter, the studio itself imploded due to various reactions to former Bondi CEO Brendan McNamara's behavior over the development cycle. He was the studio head/co-founder and, if even some of the reports are to be believed, the epitome of Executive Meddling and Small Name, Big Ego.
- It wasn't just one game that ended up bringing down Telltale Games, as every one of their games with the exception of The Walking Dead: Season One, their Breakout Hit, and Minecraft: Story Mode lost them money. Because most of their output was Licensed Games, Telltale made very small profit margins on them, requiring them to sell lots of copies in order to turn a profit. Their method of counteracting this—producing lots and lots of games as quickly as possible—also backfired on them as it burnt out their staff and prevented Telltale from innovating, improving or experimenting with their games, leading to diminishing returns in both sales and reception due to It's the Same, Now It Sucks!. It was company policy for their games to be Strictly Formula; Telltale's head at the time believed, essentially, that all they had to do was use their money from The Walking Dead to make a dozen or so more games just like it to make back a dozen times their money. In a weird way, their breakout hit ended up being their killer, by moving them away from their profitable budget games like Sam & Max: Freelance Police, Tales of Monkey Island, or Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People; instead using their new funds in endless attempts to recapture lightning in a bottle, with increasingly outdated and unimpressive results. Following the closure in 2018, the name and some of its assets were bought up by LCG Entertainment, forming a new Telltale company that has only the license to publish and sell games on Warner Bros. properties as well as its own few original I Ps.
- Terminal Reality, a developer best known for Nocturne, the first two BloodRayne games, and Ghostbusters: The Video Game, closed its doors in December 2013 with its last game being the critically panned The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct.
- Titus Software somehow survived the 1990s despite publishing a long string of mediocre to terrible games (including the now-infamous Superman 64), but their 2003 Multi-Platform RoboCop Licensed Game was a critical and commercial disaster that helped push Titus into bankruptcy a year and a half later. Its subsidiary Interplay Entertainment (purchased in 2001) survived the collapse, but just barely (Interplay had to sell the Fallout franchise to Bethesda to ease losses).
- Tranji Studios only had one title to its name — the Tenchu-like Red Ninja: End of Honor, which flopped both critically and commercially and killed any chance for Tranji to make any more games.
- Trilobyte Software struck gold with its first game, 1993's The 7th Guest for the PC, one of the first games to take advantage of the then-fledgling CD-ROM format. Along with Myst (released about six months later), The 7th Guest was one of the big Killer Apps that sold CD-ROM units, showing that they could be used for more than just edutainment software and interactive cookbooks. Like Myst, it was also among the first games to use realistic pre-rendered graphics and successfully integrate full-motion video into its basic gameplay. Not to mention that it was also one of the first video games to be marketed at a more adult audience, with its (relatively) mature storyline and challenging puzzle design. The 7th Guest, while having a slow start in sales (CD-ROM drives didn't really start to sell until Myst, whereupon people tended to pick up The 7th Guest along with it to justify buying the drive, sound card and mouse), went on to sell more than 2 million copies (which may not seem like much today, but was practically unheard of for a computer game in 1993), and Trilobyte became one of the most highly recognized developers in all of computer gaming.
Sadly, The 7th Guest would turn out to be their only real hit. The game's highly anticipated follow-up, The 11th Hour, was constantly delayed before finally being released in late 1995. It turned out to be anything but worth the wait. While the graphics were superb for their timenote , many complained about the needlessly obtuse puzzles, use of MIDI music rather than a CD-quality soundtrack (which was gradually becoming the norm by this time), and releasing on DOS when Windows 95 was becoming the gold standard for PC games. It certainly didn't help that, by this time, "adult-oriented" games were becoming more widespread and other developers were catching on to how to properly use the CD-ROM format for gaming, so neither The 11th Hour nor its predecessor seemed so special anymore. While the game sold reasonably well (300,000 copies in the US alone by early 1996), it didn't sell nearly as well as the original and (more importantly) failed to cover the massive costs of its production. After releasing only two more games, both of which flopped horribly (Clandestiny, a Lighter and Softer Spiritual Successor to The 7th Guest, sold 20,000 units; Uncle Henry's Playhouse, a Compilation Re-release of several puzzles from the previous three games, sold only 176), the company was forced to close its doors in early 1999 — by means of an eviction notice, no less! You can read more about the company in the following Gamespot editorial (which was taken off their site but thankfully transcribed by an independent blogger): The Rise And Fall Of Trilobyte.
- Vatra Games, a fledgling developer from the Czech Republic under the banner of Kuju Entertainment, entered a contract with Konami shortly after being founded. After putting out an obscure sequel to Rush'n Attack, the inexperienced company was handed the task of creating Silent Hill: Downpour, in an effort to get the project done cheaply. Downpour served only to continue the franchise's downward spiral, and Konami did not renew their contract. Vatra Games later declared bankruptcy in September 2012, after being unable to find other work.
- VectorCell, a development company created by Flashback designer Paul Cuisset, only lasted about a year before going bankrupt. Its only two known projects, AMY and an HD remake of Flashback, were both critical and commercial disasters.
- State of Emergency 2 killed both of its developers — VIS Entertainment went bankrupt in the middle of production, and DC Studios, the company that stepped in to complete the game in the wake of VIS' closure, was shut down as a direct result of the game's resulting flop at retail.
- Tomba!* quickly developed into a cult classic for the original Playstation and put developer WhooPeeCamp on the map. It was popular enough to warrant a much-publicized sequel, Tomba! 2: The Evil Swine Return, which crashed so hard into the Polygon Ceiling that it knocked WhooPeeCamp right out of business just as quickly as it came.
- Day One: Garry's Incident ultimately killed Wild Game Studios. Not only was the game negatively received by critics and players alike, it garnered controversy due to the developers abusing YouTube's copyright system to take down a negative review by TotalBiscuit, which brought to light other alleged misconduct by the developersnote . The resulting fallout led to abysmal sales, and Wild Games Studios hasn't made a game since.
- The final demise of XNauts, the successor company to the bankrupt Psikyo, can be blamed on the failure of Sengoku Cannon: Sengoku Ace Episode III, their last game not counting strip mahjong.
Albert3105
Since: Jun, 2013
#210: Dec 22nd 2020 at 6:14:00 AM
The deletion of this example was negatively received on ATT.
- The death of the Destroy All Humans! series can be blamed squarely on two lackluster sequels - Big Willy Unleashed for the Wii, and then Path of the Furon for PS3 and Xbox 360 - developed in 2008 after the original developer, Pandemic Studios, was snapped up by Electronic Arts. Neither game managed to successfully capture the spirit of the first two games, and they sold and reviewed terribly as a result. It took another decade, following the death and revival of THQ, for the first two games to receive ports, and a remake of the first game followed in 2020.
themayorofsimpleton
Now a lurker. Thanks for everything. | he/him
from Elsewhere
(Experienced, Not Yet Jaded)
Relationship Status: Abstaining
Now a lurker. Thanks for everything. | he/him
#211: Dec 22nd 2020 at 6:50:04 AM
Just commented over there, seems the deleter in question did not link back to the thread. Anyone who deletes an example, please link back to this thread to avoid disputes.
Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Dec 22nd 2020 at 9:50:20 AM
TRS Queue | Works That Require Cleanup of Complaining | Troper Wall
Packer
Since: Aug, 2013
#212: Dec 22nd 2020 at 3:04:47 PM
*deep breath*
- High Voltage Software: The fact that the entry states they still exist immediately invalidates it. Cut.
- Human Head Studios: This one looks valid from what I've looked into. Keep.
- Imagine Software: Also looks valid. Keep.
- Indie Built: Another valid entry. Keep.
- Ion Storm: Both points seem valid from what I can understand, although the second part should point out that Thief: Deadly Shadows sold poorly. Keep.
- Irem's USA division: Not sure that video has a strong enough case as their USA division remained opened three years after Super R-Type came out and only closed due to restructuring efforts. Cut.
- Irrational Games: The company shut down four years after BioShock Infinite came out. I don't think the game was responsible for that, given the timeframe. Cut.
- Kabam Beijing: Appears valid. Keep.
- Legend Entertainment: Also looks valid though it should mention that Unreal II: The Awakening had weak sales. Keep.
- LJN: This entry looks valid though it could be based on speculation as I wasn't able to find a link between Spider-Man's poor reception and the company shutting down. More input needed.
- Level-5 International America / Level-5 Abby: The entry appears valid but the link given doesn't specify if those two games had anything to do with the divisions shutting down. It also notes that the parent company had been winding down operations since last year, with the former being run by a "skeleton crew." Could just be a case of corporate restructuring. Possible cut.
- Mad Catz: The company has been revived. Cut.
- Mad Doc Software: The entry looks valid but I couldn't find any evidence to suggest that the poor response Empire Earth 3 got killed the company. Given that both Wikipedia and MobyGames lists both Mad Doc and Rockstar New England as the same company, there probably wasn't any turmoil. Possible cut.
- Micro Power: Looks valid. Keep.
- Midway Games: The entry seems valid though it doesn't look like any game Midway published around this time caused their demise. Their financial issues were too overwhelming to fix, regardless of any poor performance. Cut.
- Mirage Technologies: The company released a few more games after Rise of the Robots 1 and 2. This entry's case isn't very strong as sources are lacking. Cut.
- Motown Software: Seems legit, given the lack of info. Keep.
- The Neverhood: Also appears valid. Keep.
- nStigate Games: Looks like sales on Declassified weren't strong enough for the company to survive. Keep.
- Omni Games: A lawsuit is not a work. This entry is better suited for Role-Ending Misdemeanor. Cut.
- Over Fence: Already discussed. Keep.
- Piranha Games: They still exist. Cut.
- Pi Studios / Hudson Soft: Not sure if the game's cancellation was responsible for both companies going under. For the latter, it appears their outcome of getting swallowed up by Konami was going to happen game or no game. Cut.
- Pivotal Games: This looks valid. Keep.
- RDI Video Systems: Looks valid though it hasn't been confirmed if the console actually launched to begin with. We still need to determine if consoles contribute as works. More input needed.
- Realtime Worlds: Also appears valid. Keep.
- Ritual Entertainment: Another valid entry. Keep.
- Rooster Teeth Games: Also appears valid since Rooster Teeth's website doesn't have a game section anymore. Keep.
- Sigma Enterprises: Appears valid. Keep.
- Silicon Knights: This entry looks valid though it might be better suited for Role-Ending Misdemeanor since that lawsuit primarily took the company down. Possible keep.
- Skip Ltd: We still need confirmation that they've shut down as it hasn't been made clear yet. Hide.
- Spark Unlimited: Not sure if Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z really did do the company in since Koei Tecmo came out unscathed. The timeframe between release and closure also makes it a bit suspect. Cut.
- Starbreeze Studios: They're still around, which the entry acknowledges. Cut.
- Storm Impact: Looks like financial issues were the main cause of the studio's demise, making this entry invalid. Cut.
- Tale of Tales: The company still exists and they have an active social media presence. Cut.
- Team Bondi: Appears valid from what I've read, though this entry is better suited for One-Book Author. Keep.
- Telltale Games: Looks like a similar situation with THQ as the company has been revived although Wikipedia lists the two iterations as different companies. More input needed.
- Terminal Reality: They still exist. Cut.
- Titus Software: This entry looks valid though I'm not sure if RoboCop's performance was a factor in their demise given the timeframe and the fact that they were a parent company. Possible cut.
- Tranji Studios: Looks valid though this entry is better suited for One-Book Author. Keep.
- Trilobyte Software: Okay, that entry is a bit of a Wall of Text. Aside from that, the company has been revived. Cut.
- Vatra Games: This one appears valid. Keep.
- VectorCell: This one also seems valid. Keep.
- VIS Entertainment / DC Studios: From what I've read, this entry seems valid. Keep.
- WhooPeeCamp: Another valid entry. Keep.
- Wild Game Studios: Doesn't look like the company is active online though I'm not sure if they're defunct yet. Hide.
- XNauts: Wasn't able to find much info regarding them though the entry seems valid. Keep.
Albert3105
Since: Jun, 2013
#213: Dec 22nd 2020 at 5:59:50 PM
(self-thump)
Edited by Albert3105 on Dec 22nd 2020 at 9:02:54 AM
ccorb
from A very hot place
Since: May, 2020
Relationship Status: It's not my fault I'm not popular!
#214: Dec 24th 2020 at 7:25:03 PM
Trivia.Plumbers Dont Wear Ties:
- Creator Killer:
- IGN cited Plumbers Don't Wear Ties as the prime example of why the 3DO failed: By convincing the public that the system had low-budget, poor-quality games that did not justify the console's $700 price tag.
- Such was also the case for the game's developer, Kirin Entertainment. This was the company's first and penultimate release, and they folded after porting The Perfect General to the 3DO in 1996, which ironically was decently reviewed.
KUnlimited
Since: Sep, 2020
#215: Dec 25th 2020 at 3:23:54 AM
Regarding the Video Games page, the Disney Interactive folder now has only one example, so I want to cut it and move the example to the "Other Developers" folder.
I also want to do the same to the Nintendo folder, since neither of the companies listed there were owned by Nintendo.
Any objections?
Avatar by Butterscotch Arts. Used under license.
themayorofsimpleton
Now a lurker. Thanks for everything. | he/him
from Elsewhere
(Experienced, Not Yet Jaded)
Relationship Status: Abstaining
Now a lurker. Thanks for everything. | he/him
#216: Dec 25th 2020 at 6:18:15 AM
None.
I don't know if the 3DO counts as a "creator" per se, and even if it did there were a lot of reasons for the 3DO's failure, among others the price tag was too high and there was a lack of third-party support for the system. As for the second, maybe? I mean, if they made another, decently-received game afterward it might not be a Creator Killer per se, but I am aware of the game's bad reception and I wouldn't doubt that it hurt the reputation of its developer, so maybe?
Packer
Since: Aug, 2013
#217: Dec 25th 2020 at 7:00:32 AM
Fine by me.
We should look at the rest of the entries in the Film — Studios and Production Companies page since there are quite a few that might need to be cut.
Edited by Packer on Dec 25th 2020 at 7:01:03 AM
Musician/Composer
#218: Dec 25th 2020 at 9:37:41 AM
We should take a look at Film — Individual Creators page as well.
AmourMitts
Since: Jan, 2016
#219: Dec 25th 2020 at 3:34:39 PM
This one may have been more than a decade ago, but the Franchise Killer entry on Trivia.Temptation 2007 is one big Zero-Context Example.
And speaking of game shows, I think the one on Trivia.Card Sharks no longer applies due to the recent ABC revival.
Albert3105
Since: Jun, 2013
#220: Dec 25th 2020 at 6:58:13 PM
A resurrection later on doesn't mean the franchise death magically disappears from the history books.
Packer
Since: Aug, 2013
#221: Dec 26th 2020 at 8:45:37 AM
True, but Card Sharks was featured in CBS' Gameshow Marathon several years after the 2001 revival. Also, a few international versions of the show popped up before the 2019 revival, so I don't think the franchise was actually killed to begin with.
Going back to the Film — Studios and Production Companies page, here are my thoughts regarding the rest of the entries in the "Major Studios and Labels" folder. Feel free to weigh in before any decisions are made.
- RKO: That entry seems valid though if you look at the studio's history, their demise was actually slow and painful following The Conqueror. They stopped productions/distribution in 1957 with their final films being released two years later. As the company has gone through other incarnations over the years, this one is tricky. More input from others needed.
- Insurge Pictures: Their demise was more of a case of studio consolidation. Also sounded like Paramount was indifferent towards the label judging by the three-year gap in their filmography and wanted to phase it out when they got the chance. Cut.
- Paramount Vantage: It appears Paramount simply abandoned the label with no reason given. Cut.
- Paramount Famous Productions: That entry is based on audience reception rather than performance. Plus, Mean Girls 2 actually did well in the ratings so it most likely wasn't the reason Paramount closed the label. Cut.
- Rogue Pictures: Kinda tricky as it appears the label kept getting reactivated and dormant without rhyme or reason. Also, the sale of their library happened in 2012 to Manchester Library Company, which was acquired by Vine Alternative Investments several years later. Probably cut.
- Vivendi Universal: Looks like a shoehorned example as all parties still survived at the end of the day. Cut.
- Universal Animation Studios: Probably valid but there are some factors that complicate matters. For instance, there was The Land Before Time series that came out after Brer Rabbit. More input from others needed.
- Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Animation: Probably valid, though their demise has more to do with the founders leaving MGM to form a different animation company. More input from others needed.
- Marvel Knights: The entry seems valid though I'm getting a sense that it was simply a failed venture for the brand. Probably cut.
- UTV Motion Pictures: Appears valid. Keep.
10,000 grams of pure caffeine
#222: Jan 1st 2021 at 5:41:50 AM
Anyone familiar with the SCP Wiki? Need help with these on Trivia.SCP Foundation:
- Genre-Killer:
- SCP-1048 effectively killed the "harmless SCP who's allowed to freely wander the facility" trope by showing just how horribly that could go wrong. New entries that try to use said trope are sometimes reminded that they live in a "post-1048 world."
- Duke Til' Dawn pretty much ended the decommission stories as a whole because of how over the top it is. By this point, the wiki realised it was creating Mary Sue characters more than deleting them.
themayorofsimpleton
Now a lurker. Thanks for everything. | he/him
from Elsewhere
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#223: Jan 1st 2021 at 6:28:18 AM
I don't know a whole lot about SCP, but I have read a few and I'll share my thoughts:
- Example 1 is not a genre. It can be cut.
- Example 2 might be legit, but it should probably be rewritten to be less complain-y.
Anddrix
Since: Oct, 2014
#224: Jan 4th 2021 at 2:43:33 AM
Bringing up the following example from My Favorite Martian:
- Genre-Killer: Its failure made it one of the last of the big-budget Hollywood movie adaptations of baby boomer-era sitcoms.
themayorofsimpleton
Now a lurker. Thanks for everything. | he/him
from Elsewhere
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Relationship Status: Abstaining
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#225: Jan 4th 2021 at 7:26:21 AM
Not a genre. Cut.
Total posts: 532
Cleaned out the folders. Next up, THQ:
Edited by gjjones on Dec 19th 2020 at 11:41:41 AM
He/His/Him. No matter who you are, always Be Yourself.