Audience Alienating Era / Video Games

A No Recent Examples rule applies to this trope. Examples shouldn't be added until five years after the era begins. Please also try to avoid Complaining About Shows You Don't Like.

Sonic the Hedgehog has its own page.

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Bomberman

While people tend to blame Act:Zero for killing the series, fans would say that the 2000s as a whole was not a good time for Bomberman. In fact, it actually led to the death of the franchise until 2017. This was mainly due to ridiculous amounts of nostalgia pandering at the cost of dropping several innovations, poorly thought-out gimmicks, and some truly boneheaded cases of Executive Meddling. It didn't help that Hudson Soft was going through their own Audience-Alienating Era during that time (which would ultimately kill them).

Note that several of these entries have since been Vindicated by History. This does not, however, change the fact that the games were highly polarizing at the time of their release.

• It all started in 2000 with the Bomberman Land series, as well as the introduction of the hated developer Racjin. Bomberman Land was a Mini Game Game with very little Bomberman mechanics that was seen as So Okay, It's Average in its native Japan, but was considered generic and terrible in the West (though the authentic recreations of theme parks and the Survival Bomberman mode were well received on both sides of the pacific). It probably didn't help that the game wasn't released outside Japan... and did well enough to get sequels that got even worse reception.
• The Charaboms. While they were introduced in Bomberman 64: The Second Attack! and Bomberman Max^note the last two Bomberman games released before the Audience-Alienating Era began, nobody really minded until Hudson Soft started to force them into the single-player campaigns in an attempt to copy the success of Pokémon. This didn't go over very well with fans, because A) they'd already tried making a Pokemon clone with Robopon, B) the battle system wasn't anywhere near as good as Pokémon's, and C) the Level Grinding clashed heavily with the Bomberman gameplay style. The fan backlash resulted in the Charaboms being Put on a Bus after 2002, though they've since been Vindicated by History.
• Then came Bomberman Tournament, an early Game Boy Advance game and the sequel to Bomberman Quest. While its Battle Game was praised, the story mode was heavily panned for essentially being a Neutopia game masquerading as a Bomberman game, rather than being a proper sequel to Quest. The removal of Quest's Boss Game gameplay and the addition of the controversial Charabom mechanic (which now requires you to do extensive Level Grinding to even stand a chance against the CPU) didn't help matters. Tournament would be somewhat Vindicated by History, however.
• Bomberman Online was a late release for the Sega Dreamcast, coming out exclusively in the U.S. in October 2001. It gutted the traditional single-player gameplay for a Battle Game-centric campaign (much like Wario Blast/Bomberman GB before it) which was criticized for its Fake Difficulty (especially the bosses). While the online mode was well-received, it didn't last too long due to its very late release date.
• Bomberman Kart was a Land spin-off and the first Bomberman game on the PlayStation 2. Unfortunately, it was also a generic kart racer, which didn't sit well with fans or critics, nor did it help the perception of Land in the West. To top things off, it was only released in Japan and Europe.
• In 2002, Bomberman Generation and Max 2 hit store shelves...only to be hit with the Tough Act to Follow trope hard. The games were meant to be sequels to Bomberman 64 and Max respectively, but didn't really get fans' attention. Notably, Generation caught a lot of heat for not acknowledging the lore or characters from the previous game. The Charaboms really didn't help, either—in the former game, on top of having Tournament's Level Grinding, Generation locks several abilities behind the Charaboms, including several mechanics introduced in 64 such as the ability to control the strength of your Bomb Throw and the fan-favorite Bomb Jump. And in the latter game, some of the 'Boms are absolute Game Breakers. While Generation has been heavily Vindicated by History, Max 2 is still a Contested Sequel.
• At the end of that year, the Bomberman Jetters anime and manga were launched. Fans were split down the middle—some liked Jetters' darker storytelling and lore while others hated Shirobon and Max's different characterizations. If there was one thing that fans unanimously agreed on, however, it's that no one expected the inevitable Recursive Adaptation tie-in video game to be such a catastrophic example of The Problem with Licensed Games. It had it all: looong loading times, Charaboms^note  To be fair, the battle system was scrapped. Instead, Charaboms can be leveled up twice to gain new abilities and the Level Grinding has been greatly reduced., dreadfully long and padded levels, and loads of Fake Difficulty. Worse yet, despite being a sequel to Generation, it was released in Japan a mere six months after Gen so it could tie into the anime. Japanese fans and critics hated it, and when the game finally made it stateside in 2004, American critics butchered it and fans were through the roof in anger. It singlehandedly killed the "64-esque" gameplay style, marked the end of the road for the Charaboms (so much so that future games don't even acknowledge them) and ruined the reputation of Jetters in the west for years.
  • There was also a GBA prequel/tie-in to the anime. Unlike the console game, it was very well-received...which naturally meant that it never left Japan.
• Bomberman Hardball^note Bomberman Battles in Japan was yet another Land spin-off, this time a generic compilation of sports games, once again only released in Japan and Europe. At this point, some people wondered if Racjin (the developers of Land) were actively trying to sabotage the franchise.
• Bomberman on the Nintendo DS was released in 2005 and was the start of the series' decline heading into overdrive, as this was where the true Capcom Sequel Stagnation began. Racjin finally got to make a main series title! And it was essentially a clone of the Super Bomberman games, but with Land's art style... with all of the innovation of those titles surgically removed (save for the surprisingly fun double screen battle mode). This worsened Racjin's reputation among western fans, to the point that some feared that the franchise wouldn't last much longer.
• Then there's the big one: Bomberman Act:Zero. Seeing how poorly Bomberman had done in the sixth generation, Hudson attempted to restore goodwill with fans and critics by rebooting the series. Unfortunately, someone, somewhere, decided that Act:Zero would jump on the inexplicable late-2000s bandwagon of making cartoony franchises Darker and Edgier in a misguided attempt at appealing to Western players. When it was released, fans and critics were downright horrified at how bad the game was. Act:Zero used the same Battle Game-centric gameplay style as Online, only this time Bomberman had to survive 99 rounds with no lives or saves! Died on Round 96? Back to Round 1 for you! It also featured such gems as a "First-Person Bomber" mode that was actually third-person, a needlessly dark story about how Bombers were actually Super Soldiers made for some war with a lame A Winner Is You ending to boot, a horrible redesign that became a textbook example of bad redesigns, no local play option for the battle mode, and Jiggle Physics for the female Bombers in the normally chaste Bomberman series. Needless to say, Act:Zero quickly became a laughingstock in the industry. It was so bad that Hudson had to go into full damage control mode by apologizing for the game and abandoning the reboot... but not before insulting fans by making a Totally Radical website that invoked the Animation Age Ghetto on the older Bomberman games—even going as far as telling fans who didn't like the game to play with the PSP game (seemingly mocking the iconic Bomberman character design in the process) or Hello Kitty toys. Fans took the hint and retaliated by leaving the series en masse, resulting in Act:Zero as well as every Bomberman game released afterward bombing in sales. Hudson later teamed up with Backbone Entertainment to create Bomberman Live/Ultra, which was intended to be a saving throw, but it was too late for the series.
• Around the time of Act:Zero's release, two games were made for the PlayStation Portable. The first of these was Bakufuu Sentai Bomberman, a crossover with Super Sentai. Western fans were baffled by the concept and fans on both sides of the Pacific noted the lack of creativity in the gameplay. It also never left Japan.
• The second of the two titles was Bomberman. It suffered from the exact same problem as Bakufuu and DS—namely the lack of innovation. In fact, it was somehow an even worse rehash than DS. Fans (what little there were after the whole Act:Zero fiasco) felt that the series was starting to stagnate.
• Then there were four Land games—one for the PSP, another for the Wii and two for the DS. All of them were localized (unlike the previous titles) and all of them were very poorly received (though the DS entries were Vindicated by History due to their mini-games being more "Bomberman-esque" than past installments). The PSP Land is widely considered to be one of the worst Bomberman games by fans as it not only has the most banal plot and dialogue in the series history (including the park director rewarding you for 100% Completion by flat out telling you he doesn't plan on giving you anything for it despite the effort it took to get 100% as well as heavy Flanderization for the main characters), it also recycles nearly all of its mini-games^note to the point that they're still rendered in 4:3, costumes, and music from Land 3. Fans were convinced that Racjin would kill the franchise though Hudson at least ended the Land series after these titles.
• Bomberman Live (Ultra on the PlayStation 3) was supposed to be an apology for Act:Zero, being developed with American fans in mind. While critics loved it, fans were split—some loved it for its Battle Mode-centric gameplay while others hated it for that exact reason, feeling that it lacked innovation. Both sides agreed that the game wasn't what the series needed to get back on track. It later got a sequel in 2010...that ended up being the last Bomberman game for several years.
• In 2007, Hudson teamed up with Shockwave game developer 55shock to develop yet another online Bomberman game. The end result was Bomberman Online Japan which officially launched on September 10, 2008 (after two weeks of private beta testing). Despite being positively received and having a somewhat small but loyal playerbase, the game went on hiatus on January 31, 2009... which became permament on June 3, 2009. This was primarily due to the Japanese Shockwave webpage closing in January 2009, taking down 55shock with it. Making matters worse is the fact that Hudson had big plans for the game, including a western release and even a 2010 Bomberman World Cup! Unfortunately, the game's closure after four months squandered those plans.
• Custom Battler Bomberman was a DS title whose primary gimmick was the ability to create your own Bomberman. Unlike the previous games, Custom Battler was seen as a return to form for the series due to its innovation and fun gameplay. Unfortunately, not only did the game never see a North American release, it also had virtually no marketing in the regions that did get it, ensuring that Custom Battler would be little more than a Acclaimed Flop.
• In early 2011, Hudson announced a new 3D Bomberman game for the Nintendo 3DS. Fans were excited about this new game as there hadn't been a new 3D entry since 2002. Unfortunately, when Konami fully absorbed Hudson in 2012, the first thing they did was cancel the game. Naturally, fans were livid about this, and the end result was the infamous Bomberman drought where from 2008 to 2017 there were no mainline games in the series.
• In 2017, Konami released Super Bomberman R as a launch title for the Nintendo Switch. While critics thought it was So Okay, It's Average, fans were disappointed due to the game relying heavily on nostalgia rather than innovating the formula. While there were many updates to R, a lot of longtime fans had lost interest in the game by that point. But somehow, those who still stuck regardless were numerous enough that Konami managed to greenlit Super Bomberman R2.
• Bombergirl has a cult following in Japan, but international fans loathe it for its overuse of fanservice. Its connections to the rest of the Bomberman series are somewhat tenuous, and those that exist only result in Fan Disservice due to reminding you how un-sexy the franchise is otherwise. It's likely for this reason that Bombergirl is No Export for You. Adding salt to the wound was the death of Shoji Mizuno, the original character designer for Bomberman, when Bombergirl was released in 2018.

Final Fantasy

• The Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, spearheaded by Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, is seen as one for the FFVII sub-franchise. Advent Children was met with highly mixed reception, and many fans were not happy with the Flanderization of various characters, particularly Cloud, who was bashed as the kind of "emo pretty-boy" stereotype that eventually became a frequent point of criticism for Final Fantasy, and Square Enix, as a whole. As the Compilation continued to build up, most of the other entries like Dirge of Cerberus were also met with similar criticisms and polarizing reception. While a few standouts like Crisis Core were positively received, they weren't as prestigious and loved as the original game.
• In Final Fantasy XI, the Chains of Promathia expansion is considered to be a low point of the game's run by many, many, many players. Reasons included grueling boss fights that required very specific party combinations and a fair amount of luck to win, a main plotline that centered around an insufferably obnoxious Jerkass who was constantly hyped up as as the best thing ever by the narrative, storylines that were left hanging between updates, Notorious Monsters that were amazingly gimmicky with incredibly low drop rates for gear, and pop items for further Notorious Monsters. The era was also known for the infamous "Ranger Nerf" that, while somewhat justified in the fact that the Ranger Job was severely overpowered compared to other Jobs, went way too far and made it into one of the weakest Jobs in the game (this nerf was partially countered years later after Samurai became the new overpowered pet-Job of the dev team). Combined with the first unbeatable boss of the game, the Jailer of Love, which was then nerfed to make way for the new unbeatable boss Absolute Virtue, quite a lot of mid to end-game players left FFXI to play World of Warcraft. Not that Chains of Promethia was completely terrible; the mission storyline is among the longest and most interesting in the game (and better than some of the storylines of the main games), created systems and fights that are still popular years later like Limbus, ENMs, Bahamut, and Ouryu, and included many in-depth optional side quests such as Adventuring Fellows (your own personal NPC). Changes to the mission fights were made to help players, such as making the fights easier, removing the experience penalty if they fall during battles, rewarding players with experience if they help people with the battles, and easing the restrictions of special items that help to make the battles easier- but these were made after the next expansion, Treasures of Aht Urhgan, when most players will agree that the era ended with a vengeance with a completely new philosophy in game design. (That it shouldn't be terrible to do things in the game.) Many people look fondly at the Chains of Promethia expansion, mainly because time has passed and people don't quite remember the original controller-throwing difficulty of the unnerfed missions, or they had only played the missions after they had been nerfed. Also, not losing thousands upon thousands of XP to the then unnerfed Jailer of Love and the still-to-this-day unnerfed Absolute Virtue may well help to keep those glasses rose-colored.
• Final Fantasy XIII and the entire Fabula Nova Crystallis are one of Square Enix's lowest points depending on who you ask. In spite of how well it reviewed, the original game was criticised by a number of fans for many aspects, primarily its linearity, convoluted narrative and controversial cast. The sequel, while seen as better by some for addressing many aspects of the first game, it still had its detractors for a convoluted story based in time travel shenanigans and an abrupt Downer Ending. By the time the third game came out, many people had just stopped caring — which wasn't helped by the game coming out at the end of The Seventh Generation of Console Video Games. Even outside of the XIII sub-franchise itself, Square Enix had begun to push Lightning in some of their other products, including Dissidia 012 [duodecim]: Final Fantasy giving her a prominent role in the game, leading to many accusing her of being a Creator's Pet.
• Final Fantasy XIV:
  • When the game launched in 2010, there were lots of bugs, terrible optimization that made the game run sluggishly for most PC users, and many game mechanics that were not looked upon favorably, such as having experience points being reduced in gains if you try to level up too much. Once the development team got replaced with new faces, the game was reworked from the ground up and relaunched three years later with favorable results; players could complete quests at their own leisure, items were mostly easy to obtain, and the game was very stable and optimized. However, a second audience-alienating era came along shortly after the rerelease; certain materials were hard to find or buy due to people and bots alike farming the materials and then selling the materials back on the market for absurdly high prices. End game gear that wasn't part of a loot drop were regulated to many weeks (or even months) of grinding for special tomes that were needed to obtain said gear. A few patches did address the issues, but the next major patch introduced more problems with the Atma system where players had to get 12 specific items from 12 specific events that pop up at random times in order to power up their Infinity +1 Sword. The problem is that the events can take hours to appear and the items from the event have ridiculously low drop rates. The fanbase had exploded in anger over the Atma system and some have compared it to the same systems that were used in Final Fantasy XI.
  • Gordias, the first tier of the Alexander raid series, ended up being an audience-alienating era for FFXIV's raiding community. It was the first tier where Square Enix implemented the game’s current raid difficulty system: a Story Difficulty Setting for the playerbase at large, and a Savage version for hardcore raiders. The problem was that Savage mode ended up being leagues harder than Normal mode, with incredibly punishing mechanics (it was common with one mechanic for Manipulator to completely skip it by everyone dying beforehand and getting revived with a healer Limit Break) and tight DPS checks, in addition to each boss being gear-gated to having all the gear from the previous boss. It didn’t help that the first boss had a miniboss before it with the exact same DPS and healing check, which meant that casual to mid-core raid groups weren’t able to see any bosses at all. In the next patch, a new Extreme Trial was released to give players an alternate method of getting the gear necessary to clear the tier; however, said trial (Thordan’s Reign) ended up being almost as soul-crushingly difficult as Gordias itself. In the end, the raiding community’s population took a sharp nosedive throughout the tier, and wouldn’t recover its pre-Gordias numbers until the Shadowbringers expansion.

Nintendo

• 2015 was one of the worst times to be an Animal Crossing fan, with the releases of Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer and Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival. The former was perceived as So Okay, It's Average for its lack of any challenge or substance beyond the basic gameplay loop, while the latter was critically panned for its board-based gameplay and reliance on the amiibo, and for not being a mainline Animal Crossing game for the Wii U. This would eventually be alleviated a bit with the Welcome amiibo update for Animal Crossing: New Leaf in 2016, but the franchise would not get another main game for another five years with Animal Crossing: New Horizons; which would go on to be the best-selling entry in the series by several country miles and the second best-selling Switch game (only behind Mario Kart 8 Deluxe's juggernaut sales), so it's safe to say the dark days of the series are long behind it.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • The GameCube/GBA era was one at the time of its release. The flagship game of this era, Super Mario Sunshine, was controversial due to its unconventional gameplay, and was criticized for its voice acting and relative lack of polish. The rest of the era was dominated with remakes and spin-off entries (Mario Party, Mario Kart, Super Mario Advance, sports titles, etc.) — in fact, the GBA is the only Nintendo console besides the Virtual Boy to not have an original Mario platformer, other than the Game Boy Color, which had Wario games but no Mario games other than ports — the closest being Mario vs. Donkey Kong — with the only other big headers being Mario Kart: Double Dash!!, which was still a bit divisive, and the RPGs Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door and Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga. In hindsight, these games have been Vindicated by History or become Cult Classics such as the GameCube Parties, Luigi's Mansion, Super Mario Strikers (both of which eventually spawned their own series), and particularly Sunshine, which has since been widely lauded as a worthy successor to the genre-defining Super Mario 64.
  • The Paper Mario subseries is often thought to have entered one in 2012. It started with Paper Mario: Sticker Star, which was a heavily controversial game for removing the story, exploration and RPG elements that made previous installments so beloved (the former being suggested by Miyamoto no less). Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam was mostly held aloft by the great gameplay and characterization approach of its other constituent series, but is itself a Contested Sequel among fans of that series due to still suffering from a few of the same problems as later Paper Mario games. Paper Mario: Color Splash was slightly better-received, but with fans still soured on Sticker Star and it being released at the tail of the Wii U era, it still had a pretty divided reaction on release as well as poor sales. Paper Mario: The Origami King managed to win back a number of fans, with its improved gameplay, interconnected overworld, greater variation in NPC designs, outstanding soundtrack, and more dramatic plotline all receiving praise, though whether or not it manages to live up to the first three games is still heavily debated. It's also debated whether Super Paper Mario should count as part of this era, and if Color Splash may have ended it, as both games had divisive receptions that have since been softened by time. Although the announcement of the Video Game Remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door in 2023 was met with unanimous praise, it remains to be seen if Nintendo will return the Paper Mario series to its roots and see the series' AAE dissipate for good.
  • Mario Party started out with three well-received games on the Nintendo 64, but became repetitive and formulaic by the time of the Nintendo GameCube sequels; and Mario Party Advance released during the same period, while considered as alright on its own merits as a single player mission-based experience, was disliked by numerous series fans who didn't appreciate that led to it having a poor multiplayer experience in a franchise primarily known for its multiplayer. Mario Party 8, an early Wii title, got mixed reviews and divisive fan reception alike, and Mario Party DS, the Nintendo DS follow-up that was released the same year, was considered was considered okay but not as good as the N64 games for largely similar reasons, particularly for feeling technologically dated. However, in an ironic twist of fans and critics complaining the games to be too similar, when the Mario Party series returned from hibernation, the mixed reception to the newer games being too different invoked a sense of Vindicated by History for the Nintendo GameCube titles, as well as 8 and DS from fans who prefer the old formula.
    
    The series then went into hibernation for several years until NDcube^note Which unlike popular belief had most of the same core staff from Hudson, who moved to NDcube made Mario Party 9 and tried to Win Back the Crowd by changing the game mechanics considerably, most notably having all players travel around the board in the same car. Again the Mario Party audience was divided, this time over whether it changed too much rather than changed too little. Mario Party 10 on the Wii U was based on this formula just more streamlined, and got a similar response.
    
    Mario Party: Island Tour on the 3DS was an attempt to tide over those who felt alienated by 9 with more traditional gameplay, and ended up being regarded as slightly below average at best. Mario Party: Star Rush for the 3DS tries to mix up the formula once more. While it is considered a decent attempt and a marked improvement over the other NDcube Mario Party titles, it was still seen as nothing more than just slightly above-average, and Mario Party: The Top 100 was met with mixed reactions for solely focusing on the minigames and not having any true boards, therefore having positive reactions from those that liked the minigames the most but not the rest. However when Super Mario Party was announced for Nintendo Switch and lacked the car and went back to the gameplay of the Hudson Soft-produced titles, fans were overjoyed.^note Super is actually not the first NDcube-produced installment to lack the car mechanic. Island Tour featured boards with each player moving separately, while the board modes in Star Rush and The Top 100 were also completely devoid of the car mechanic by way of each player moving simultaneously yet individually. Mario Party Superstars, 3 years later, completely returned to the series' roots and the gameplay of the original installments with modern visuals and audio and various QoL enhancements, featuring classic minigames like The Top 100 but without the Audience-Alienating Premise of not having any boards, and was met with universal praise, marking the series officially out of its audience-alienating era, at least for now.
  • The Mario sports games are generally seen to have entered a decline starting in the 3DS and Wii U era. The roots took place with Mario Tennis Open developed by Camelot Software Planning, which was seen as just okay. Its main criticisms were that the Miis were hilariously overpowered, its gameplay was luck-based and unbalanced, and the online multiplayer was laggy despite being region-locked, which led to it quickly dying off despite being touted as a major selling point. Mario Golf: World Tour, also developed by Camelot Software Planning, fared better than Open, but it wasn't as well-received as Toadstool Tour, and its story mode was considered inferior to Advance Tour's.
    
    It wouldn't be until Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash that the decline would be set in stone, due to being very barebones. While it greatly refined the graphics and gameplay, and had significantly improved worldwide online multiplayer, it also didn't have any kind of story/tournament mode or side content, a small roster, and one of its major new modes — Mega Battle — was dismissed as gimmicky^note Although its other main addition —Classic Tennis— was generally well received (by those who actually played it, anyway) as it had options that pleased both fans of the original N64/GameCube games (tennis without any chance or special shots) and fans that had issues with Open (the addition of the Jump Shots and the titular Ultra Smash, punishment mechanics that made the gameplay much more strategic and negated the luck-based and unbalanced aspects of Open) all of which had fans suspect that the game was pushed out early to substitute Star Fox Zero as the Wii U's holiday 2015 title. This also caused the game to be Overshadowed by Controversy (even by people who don't care about the series at all), with its improvements being ignored. In the same time period, Camelot and Bandai Namco Entertainment also developed Mario Sports Superstars, which was seen as just average. Criticism was directed at its small number of features, lacking roster, and overall simplified gameplay of all sports represented, as well as its emphasis on amiibo cards and extensive reuse of content from previous games, all of which drew unfavorable comparisons to Square Enix's Mario Sports Mix.
    
    There was hope that the Switch era would fix the problems with the previous games; it did to an extent, but introduced its own problems. Mario Tennis Aces was seen as an improvement over Ultra Smash — reintroducing a proper story mode, for one — but it shared the same problem of lacking content. However, Aces added extra content through post-launch updates, a controversial practice among fans. Mario Golf: Super Rush not only overhauled the power bar mechanic (a contested change which many fans disliked), but also had similar problems of lacking base content and receiving post-launch updates, a pattern which caused fans to accuse Camelot of rushing out incomplete games.
    
    Mario Strikers Battle League, developed by Next Level Games, is also considered to be part of this era. While its gameplay is seen as mostly solid (besides the goalies' questionable AI, the stages being smaller and less varied than in prior games, and the removal of the fan-favorite Mega Strikes)^note And some also weren't fans of the removal of the sidekicks, it also had post-launch updates in a similar span of time. Unlike Camelot's Switch titles, it also lacks significant single-player content, and as unbelievable as it may seem, actually has less than even Ultra Smash^note Battle League has the same number of playable characters (16, post-updates), has less stadiums (9 vs. 8), and completely lacks any modes besides solo (in Cups) or multiplayer (in Clubs) Strikers matches (not even a Knockout Challenge or Mega Ball Rally like Ultra Smash, or Striker Challenges like Mario Strikers Charged)., with its updates only adding a few more characters and stadiums. It only received somewhat less flack compared to the Camelot games because it was the first Mario Strikers in a long time (15 years) and the Strikers games have never been particularly content-rich. Another criticism Camelot's later entries and Battle League receive is their lack of personality compared to earlier titles. Instead of having unique animations and voice acting, the newer entries have comparatively generic animations and reused voice clips, adding to the sense that they have become rushed and barebones.^note Some games have this worse than others; Battle League and Super Rush have unique animations, Ultra Smash and Aces also have new animations but are shared between them for characters that appear in both games, and Sports Superstars reuses all animations from previous titles All of these things have made the Mario sports games very divisive among fans.
• Metroid: After being revived to universal acclaim through the Metroid Prime Trilogy by Retro Studios, the franchise stumbled into one hard starting with Team Ninja's Metroid: Other M, which was widely maligned by the fanbase for its more streamlined and linear gameplay, unconventional control scheme, and notorious storyline that many felt did a disservice to the character of series protagonist Samus Aran. The game was met with middling reviews and was a commercial flop, resulting in Nintendo letting the series lie low for a while. The next game wouldn't be until six years later with Metroid Prime: Federation Force, a spin-off game that also saw predominantly negative reactions due to starring Galactic Federation grunts while Samus would only cameo on occasion), utilizing a more simplified and deformed artstyle, and being a team co-op shooter. Fans were convinced that Nintendo was actively trying to kill the franchise, with some even going as far to call for the game's cancellation, and the game became the worst-selling entry in the series (behind even Metroid Prime Pinball). Not helping matters was the DMCA takedown of the positively received Fan Remake, Another Metroid 2 Remake, which happened right around Federation Force's release. All-in-all, fans were convinced that Metroid was dead... until Nintendo announced not one, but two new Metroid games the following year. One of which would release just months later to widespread critical praise, restoring a lot of faith in the franchise with fans. And while the other game, Metroid Prime 4, would see a Troubled Production, any fears that that the series wasn't yet back in top form were banished upon the reveal and release of Metroid Dread^note (a game that has been rumored about since the days of the Nintendo DS, no less) in 2021, which also saw strong critical reception and quickly went on to become the best-selling game in the series. With the release of a remaster of the first Metroid Prime in late 2022 to great criticial and fan acclaim, and the rest of the Prime Trilogy poised to get the same treatment, many now view the franchise's time of turmoil as being firmly in the past.
• After Rare was bought by Microsoft in 2002, the Donkey Kong franchise struggled in finding a new identity for itself (though some fans started seeing problems earlier with Donkey Kong 64, particularly its Collection Sidequest nature). Donkey Kong stopped getting new Donkey Kong Country games (relying in that regard on divisive ports for the Game Boy Advance) and went into quirky spin-off titles that, while having their share of fans, weren't particularly amazing. These included the Donkey Konga series of rhythm games with very few songs actually from previous games, Donkey Kong Jungle Beat which, while a fun platformer with a unique control scheme that works better than it sounds, had nothing to do with Donkey Kong Country and got a lot of hate for it, and Donkey Kong Barrel Blast, a racing game that was criticized for its poor controls and slow-paced feel compared to other games in the series. Not helping matters was that, after the buyout, a weird backlash developed against Rare's Donkey Kong games, with many Nintendo loyalists (including Nintendo Power) spitefully trashing not only DK64 but even the beloved original trilogy. Fortunately, the franchise's audience-alienating era finally came to an end in 2010, when Retro Studios took over and developed Donkey Kong Country Returns, which was released to wide acclaim and brought in a new legion of DK fans (plus ended the Hype Backlash the original trilogy was receiving in the mid-00s), resulting in an equally acclaimed sequel, Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, being released in 2014 with a Switch port releasing four years later.
• For much of the 2010s, the Wario franchise was stuck in a bit of a rut. Wario stopped getting new platforming games after Wario Land: Shake It! in 2008 (which was critically acclaimed and a commercial success but didn't meet sales expectations), while his other series, WarioWare, experienced back-to-back flops following the release of WarioWare: Smooth Moves in 2006. WarioWare: Snapped! was intended to showcase the Nintendo DSi's camera, but only ended up proving its unsuitability as a form of input with its dearth of content and the game being very difficult to set up and control. WarioWare: D.I.Y. was critically acclaimed but sold poorly as its focus on user-generated content made it a tough sell. The Wii U title Game & Wario quickly became controversial for ditching the fast-paced microgames that had been the series trademark for long-form minigames and sold worse than D.I.Y. Fortunately, 2018's WarioWare Gold proved to be a modest success in the series' native Japan and was warmly received by critics and fans alike for returning to the series' roots as well as upgrading the presentation, with full voice acting and lots of features. The game was well-received enough to successfully revive the series; a 2021 Nintendo Switch sequel titled WarioWare: Get It Together! saw a similarly warm reception and was a much bigger commercial success, and another Switch sequel titled WarioWare: Move It! was announced shortly after. The platformer branch of the franchise still lays dormant, however.
• Star Fox has been stuck in a rut for a long time, with Nintendo's attempts to revive the series only seeming to bury it even deeper. Star Fox was an SNES classic and Star Fox 64 is still seen as the best game in the series (despite effectively being a remake of the original), but Nintendo have struggled with the series ever since. Star Fox Adventures, despite being seen as a decent game, stripped away the series' signature sci-fi vehicle combat in exchange for a Zelda-style action-adventure, which fans didn't warm up to (not helped by the fact that Adventures wasn't originally meant to be a Star Fox game). Star Fox: Assault was seen as a step in the right direction, but the game heavily featured on-foot missions which were still divisive. Star Fox Command was entirely based around vehicle combat, but in an arena style unlike previous games and it had a highly controversial story. The 2010's saw one of Nintendo's strongest efforts to bring the series back to glory, but the results put the series in a hiatus that is still ongoing. First was a remaster of Star Fox 64 for the Nintendo 3DS; whilst it is seen as a great release and the definitive way to play the original, it alienated some fans who were clamouring for a continuation of the story left from Command. However, Star Fox Zero ended up being the last straw; a very expensive game that wasn't received well critically or commercially. Critics were turned off by the gimmicky gameplay that forced usage of the Wii U gamepad as well as the short length of the campaign, whilst fans were displeased over the game's story being another Continuity Reboot of the series, discarding fan-favourite characters such as Krystal in the process. There is still hope for the future of the series; the characters are still popular enough to guest-star in other games, Krystal made an appearance as an Assist Trophy in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and the long-unreleased Star Fox 2 was finally given an official release by Nintendo in the SNES Classic mini-console; but the series remains dormant for now.
• The Wii U was seen as a tragic case of Uncertain Audience sinking most of Nintendo's userbase. It was an attempt to appeal to the core gamer crowd with a more powerful console, but said demographic had already long moved on to their rivals and PC for that, and Nintendo had not been able to shake off their Animation Age Ghetto stigma.^note Which took off with the GameCube, but contrary to popular belief, that was not an Audience-Alienating Era because it was still very profitable for Nintendo. Besides, the soon impending release of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One would render any hardware advantage the Wii U offered moot. The Wii U's weaker hardware and unusual (by eighth generation standards, at least) architecture disincentivized multi-platform ports from third-party developers, ensuring that third-party support for the system was dead on arrival save for some PS3 and Xbox 360 ports from very late in the seventh generation. For the casual crowd that jumped on board with the Wii, the name misled people into thinking it was just a Wii add-on, and thus sales plummeted. The one redeeming factor of the Wii U was that the separate GamePad concept ended up being the foundation of the far more successful Nintendo Switch. In addition, Nintendo had such massive savings that they could take the loss from this miscalculated risk which would have otherwise doomed a console manufacturer. In the end, Nintendo were forced to cut the Wii U's lifespan short in the middle of the generation, lasting only a little over four years. Despite lingering doubt from gamers and the press, Nintendo was able to replace the Wii U with the Switch, and now with a clear goal and marketing in mind (a hybrid home console that can be played on the go targeting all gamers), it was able to completely move past the Animation Age Ghetto stigma and be able to be targeted to all interested gamers to much greater success, ending up as one of the best selling video game consoles of all time, with many Wii U games^note Almost all first party ones besides the ones that heavily relied on the GamePad. being ported to Switch (and some to 3DS).
• Kirby is considered to have undergone a slump between Masahiro Sakurai departing from HAL Laboratory in 2003 and Shinya Kumazaki stepping in as series director in 2008. Due to the main team at HAL being tied up in multiple failed attempts to continue the series, Kirby would be farmed out to various outside teams. The two mainline games released during this period would garner receptions ranging from divisive (Amazing Mirror) to underwhelming (Squeak Squad), while the spin-off Canvas Curse would largely be overlooked as an insubstantial Tech-Demo Game despite being fairly well received. Kumazaki would eventually take control of the franchise after this period, starting with the Ultra remake of Kirby Super Star, then using the work on that game to put together a vision that would properly continue the mainline Kirby games with Kirby's Return to Dream Land.
• Pokémon: Generation 3, the Game Boy Advance era (2002-2006), though this was less to do with the quality of the games themselves and more the explosive fad ending and the series being increasingly seen as kiddy and uncool outside the online fandom. Not helping matters was the backlash from fans over Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire having only half the total monsters, which was only compounded by similar controversy over Misty leaving Pokémon: The Series despite her being part of the established Power Trio with Ash and Brock. It's hard to imagine these days, but even director Junichi Masuda was worried the franchise was in danger of cancellation. This started to reverse with Pokémon Diamond and Pearl riding the upswing of the Popularity Polynomial and, Broken Base aside, the franchise has been stable in pop culture ever since.

Other games

• The .hack franchise went through an Audience-Alienating Era starting with Hack//Link, a Japan-only PSP entry released back in 2010. The plot where a 14-year-old called Tokio Kuryuu gets sucked into this new game (apparently physically) by a mysterious new classmate, Saika Amagi, via her PSP was met with highly negative feedback and critical reception, alongside horrible sales. Link was followed by an OVA called .hack//Quantum that received a similarly poor reception. 2012 saw three new entries on the franchise: a full-length CGI movie set in The World FORCE:ERA called .hack//Beyond The World, a game by the name of .hack//Versus and an OVA called The Thanatos Report. None of the works were well-received as they retconned a fair amount of the series extensive Lore. Fortunately the 2017 remake of the .hack//G.U. trilogy, .hack//G.U. Last Recode seemed to have steered the franchise back to a proper course. Worth nothing that it doesn't acknowledge any of the entries described here... Well, except for Link and only to make fun of it by having Haseo and Shino give a rather unflattering description of the ill-conceived plot of that game during a Parody Mode sketch.
• The Ace Combat series went through such a period during The New '10s. After Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation underperformed in sales (largely because it was an Xbox 360 exclusive in a series that was almost entirely exclusive to PlayStation consoles until then), developer Project Aces went through a series of ill-advised experiments in an attempt to expand to a new audience, most notably by ditching the series' "Strangereal" setting for the real world. The first game in this period, Ace Combat: Joint Assault, was criticized for the setting change but was otherwise thought as completely average entry; things however would really heat up with the next "main" game Ace Combat: Assault Horizon, which went toward a more gritty Call of Duty-esque direction and ditched many series staples for controversial new mechanics, most infamously, the Dogfight Mode. Other titles released in this period included Ace Combat: Northern Wings, a mobile phone spin-off thought to be amusingly crap due to its odd handling of the series' lore and a generally sloppy nature, and Ace Combat: Assault Horizon Legacy, a well-received remake of Ace Combat 2 that largely went unnoticed due to being a Nintendo 3DS exclusive and being branded in the West as a tie-in to Assault Horizon despite having little to do with it. Project Aces would later release the free-to-play title Ace Combat Infinity, which successfully appealed to nostalgia but was criticized for what many saw as embodying the worst aspects of the F2P model. Nevertheless, Infinity ended up being one of the most successful games in Namco's Free to Play initiative, enough so that the series' producer Kazutoki Kono received the greenlight for a proper sequel. Despite repeated delays and a troubled development, Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown ended up bringing the series back in a big way, receiving nearly unanimous approval from the fanbase and breaking series launch records in multiple countries.
• Many fans have agreed that Angry Birds has been suffering from this for a while, though where it began tends to be up for debate.
  • Some believe that the decline began in 2015, where the franchise went for a push in match-making spin-off games, such as Angry Birds Fight! and Angry Birds POP!. Aside from those games, this year also saw the release of the long-awaited Angry Birds 2; while it was received positively for being a worthy successor to the original, it garnered a mixed reaction for its free-to-play aspects, such as the lives system. To make matters worse, some of the older games such as the original game and Seasons got "updates" which sucked the fun out of them for the fans — specifically, Classic got worse physics, while Seasons had its older episodes locked behind paywalls. And it was on the game's 5th anniversary, no less.
  • Others believe the era began from 2016 to 2018. These three years not only saw an increase of more match-making titles such as Match, Blast, and Dream Blast, but this also saw the release of The Angry Birds Movie, which received mixed reviews for being another mediocre video game movie adaptation. From this point forward, Rovio began focusing their attention on marketing the movie, evident by altering the icons and title screens of the older games to use the movie designs, and even using the movie designs for the base of their later titles, such as Action and Evolution. They also cancelled Angry Birds Toons and Angry Birds Stella (as well as discontinuing its video game version, leaving it on a cliffhanger), renewed the spin-off show Piggy Tales for a third and fourth season using the designs from the movie, and gave Angry Birds Go! a complete makeover which practically killed the game in the eyes of many fans. Most of the games released were So Okay, It's Average at best and mediocre at worst.
  • Most people, however, can come to an agreement that 2019 and 2020 is where everything truly went to hell. This year was when The Angry Birds Movie 2 released to similarly mixed reception to the first installment. This obviously meant that more games were released in the movie style, and even Angry Birds 2 got updated to add Zeta and Leonard as a new boss and new playable character respectively. But this was only the sideshow; the main event that took place was Rovio discontinuing all of their older games except for Angry Birds Friends and everything after Angry Birds: Transformers (Bad Piggies returned to the app store not long after). According to Rovio, themselves, the reason for this was because they wanted to focus on updating their newer titles. What made this especially baffling is that this happened during the franchise's 10th anniversary. Regardless of their excuse, fans were outraged to see their favorite games purged from the app store, and it sparked the infamous "#BringBack2012" in a push to convince Rovio to right their wrongs. And surprisingly, Rovio ended up listening to them. In July of 2021, Rovio released a new, revised apology to their fans, promising to bring back their older titles to make up for two terrible years. And surely enough, they released Angry Birds Reloaded a few weeks later to positive reception. And in March 2022, they held their end of the bargain by releasing a remake of the original game, titled Rovio Classics: Angry Birds. In spite of the positive reception these games have been getting, it has yet to be seen when the franchise will come out of its slump.
• The Assassin's Creed games fell into one in the mid-2010s.
  • First, there was Assassin's Creed: Unity in 2014. The first game in the series made for eighth-generation consoles that wasn't a Polished Port like Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag had been, Unity was an Obvious Beta at launch that suffered from horrible glitches, many of which quickly went memetic in the worst possible way. Ubisoft outright apologized for the state the game was released in, releasing the first DLC campaign for free and giving away a free game^note Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, The Crew, Far Cry 4, Just Dance 2015, Rayman Legends, or Watch_Dogs to everybody who bought the season pass for Unity as compensation, and temporarily halting the annualized release schedule of the Assassin's Creed games in order to give their studios more time to fix bugs. Worse, even after the bugs were ironed out, opinion on Unity was that it was merely So Okay, It's Average, especially on the story front, with criticism coming in for a cliched ending, a Romantic Plot Tumor in Arno and Elise's relationship, and a slanted portrayal of the events of The French Revolution that was rooted in royalist conspiracy theories from that era (such that the French leftist politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon called it "propaganda"). That said, the game has since started to be Vindicated by History when it was discovered that the in-game recreation of Notre Dame could be used to restore the original after it caught fire in early 2019.
  • Backlash against Unity wound up coloring the reception of Assassin's Creed Syndicate in 2015, which was, despite lacking the awful bugs of Unity, still a sales disappointment that many critics judged perhaps more harshly than it deserved after the disaster of Unity. Among those who played it, while the story and characters were praised as a return to form (save for, again, some Romantic Plot Tumors), the gameplay, while decent and up to the standard of the pre-Unity games, was seen as fairly stale and dependent on gimmicks like the gang warfare mechanic. The mixed reception for the film adaptation in 2016 didn't help matters either. The far more positive reception for Assassin's Creed Origins in 2017, which benefited from Ubisoft's focus on giving the developers more time (Syndicate having already been well into production by the time they changed course) and heavily shook up the gameplay for the better, put the franchise back on its feet for good.
  • Retroactively, more people are saying it started with III. With that game getting a mixed reception from fans due to several controversial changes like Connor not being that likable compared to Ezio from the immediately preceding games, Desmond having to perform a Heroic Sacrifice to save the world in a connection to the 2012 Mayan Apocalypse (which led to the final sequences to be rushed to meet the Cosmic Deadline), buggy and unpolished gameplay, and other things. While Black Flag was well-received, the series was mostly left directionless due to losing the main modern day protagonist that was driving it for the next several games and not being replaced with anyone else until Origins. The overall narrative set up at the end of III keeps getting forgotten with each successive game (the plot of the Goddess, Juno, Desmond set free with sacrificing himself has gone nowhere since Rogue and wasn't really an overwhelming presence, coming right out of nowhere when it was reintroduced at the end of that game), the historical accuracy (which the game series is often lauded for and took very seriously for the longest time) isn't as much of a priority in some of the newer games, the mechanics of the series not being much of a priority, such as introducing multiple endings when the premise of the series revolves around reliving memories that either happened a certain way (with some leeway, i.e. Optional Objectives) or they didn't happen at all, for example, and the shifts the series has taken in terms of gameplay structure. Up until Syndicate, the series was a stealth game series with a heavy emphasis on linear storytelling centered around the modern day protagonist learning about the Assassin Brotherhood through the Animus and having the modern day segments be linked to the past ones, which may or may not have worked depending on your opinion of said games. From Origins on, the series switched gears to being Action RPGs and being very heavily influenced by The Witcher, only not as well done. While most were fine with Origins, Odyssey proved very divisive with the fanbase due to continuity errors, inconsistencies, game elements that don't make much sense, historical accuracy problems (such as the presence of female warriors and mostly glossing over the misogyny of antiquity era Greece), and other things, while casuals have had some problems with how some elements were handled such as the fact that Kassandra/Alexios were set up to be bisexual or even just gay or straight if the player wanted them to be, only for one of the DLCs to make them canonically straight at the end of it, which Ubisoft later patched to change that. Ubisoft's introduction of intrusive microtransactions that affect gameplay (such as limiting how much experience you gain through grinding to entice players to buy with real money packs that increase how much experience points you gain) hasn't sat well with most players, as well as the game's bad balance of the fact that, if you're only a few levels below your enemies, you can get curb stomped or will just have a very tough time beating them. Origins had a good balance and amount of experience points you gain, so Odyssey has no excuse for why they changed it so much. Some people have given up on the franchise being like it once was or are just cautious towards new games as a result.
• In a combination of this and Sequelitis, with no less than one release every year, the Atelier Series has gone through a few audience-alienating eras due to all of its sequels. The first audience-alienating era came with the Iris trilogy, which were divisive to say the least as these games strayed too far from the original Item Crafting formula that had been a series staple five games prior, and felt more like average traditional RPGs with the usual "save the world" plots. The fact that these games were the first to be localized in the west didn't help matters as they skewered western perception of the series and caused a lot of fans to overlook item crafting as an "unoriginal" gimmick. Even attempts to legitimately mix up the franchise such as Mana Khemia and Atelier Annie, which added a little Simulation Game to the mix with its focus on helping to develop an island, sometimes came off as a bit stale, and quality assurance took a precipitous dip in the late Noughts, as evidenced by Atelier Liese and Mana Khemia 2 and their evisceration in the Japanese gaming press (the voluntary recall of Atelier Liese notwithstanding). The series was on a roll again with the Arland and Dusk trilogies up until Atelier Shallie, which ended the Dusk trilogy in a disappointing manner, with Atelier Sophie selling mostly because of the promises that Atelier would be going back to its roots. People then found out that Sophie was anything but that, which led to the low sales of the other two of the Mysterious trilogy and marked the beginning of the second audience-alienating era. It didn't help that Atelier Firis launched in a horribly buggy state, and while Atelier Lydie & Suelle was more well-received, it was already too late for the trilogy. However, Gust seems to have learned from this, as their brief return to the Arland saga with Atelier Lulua was generally met with postive reviews, and Atelier Ryza turned out to be the best-selling Atelier game in Japan in decades. It appears the series has recovered from its long string of audience-alienating eras, at least for the time being.
• Backyard Sports, with the games from 2006 onward. There had been numerous character changes and removed characters, and the announcers were incredibly boring.
• Banjo-Kazooie: It’s a general agreement that the franchise hasn’t been the same ever since Rare was bought by Microsoft. After the success of the first game and Banjo-Tooie, the Microsoft-era games would follow, with mixed to negative reception. First, there was Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty's Revenge, which was seen as just an okay Collect-a-Thon Platformer that is ultimately quite short, easy, and forgettable at the end of the day, while its Java phone version was panned for being completely non-functional. Next, there was Banjo-Pilot, a spin-off title supposedly based on Diddy Kong Racing that was seen as a mediocre racing game similar to Grunty’s Revenge. And of course, one can’t talk about the demise of the bear and bird duo without bringing up Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. This game was thrashed by fans for its shift from platforming to a focus on vehicles, a very bizarre Art Evolution, and in general being a massive change in format for the series that fans couldn’t settle with. The game was so poorly received that it ultimately killed the franchise altogether (several bits of dialogue in the game even predicted that the game would do poorly), and aside from appearing in Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing^note Only in the Xbox 360 version and as a DLC fighter in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, the series has not seen a new title since.
• The BlazBlue franchise has entered one since the late 2010s. The warning signs were BlazBlue: Central Fiction not being dubbed dividing a significant chunk of the fandom. But what truly started it was with BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle, which had a hugely controversial launch unseen since the days of Street Fighter X Tekken due to half of its roster being locked behind DLC despite them save for the RWBY characters being reused assets and the game being released during the ongoing fallout from Star Wars Battlefront II (2017) over its monetization practices, which made gamers (especially western gamers) wary of post-launch monetization. Even after the clarification that the entire 20- character DLC set would only increase the game's $50 price tag by $20, the damage had been done. Couple that with the game's lackluster reception in the competitive fighting game community, the Troubled Production and failure of BlazBlue Alternative: Dark War (which actually led to its creator Toshimichi Mori leaving the company), and Arc System Works's increasing emphasis on its flagship Guilty Gear franchise, the BlazBlue franchise has been stuck at a rock-bottom point with little hope of getting out, even with Minoru Kidooka's assurance that the series isn't done.
• In the late 1990s, Konami farmed out the development of the Contra series to Hungarian developer Appaloosa, resulting in the creation of the series' two PlayStation installments Contra: Legacy of War (which also saw release on the Sega Saturn) in 1996, and C: The Contra Adventure in 1998. Both games were critically panned when they came out and Konami even canceled plans to localize the first of the two titles in Japan after the negative reception it received, which makes one wonder why they would give Appaloosa a second chance. It's made all the worse by the fact that Legacy of War relied on a 3D glasses gimmick for sales (we're talking '50s B-Movie red/blue cardboard glasses here) and massively derailed existing characters and canon, considering these followed on from Contra: Hard Corps, one of the more story-heavy Contra games, it did not go well. It should be noted that both games are explicitly exiled from the Contra canon. Contra: Rogue Corps was panned heavily because of seemingly returning to the style of Appaloosa's games, in addition of the already destroyed reputation of Konami thanks to previous controversies.
• Originally a popular mobile game, Supercell's Clash of Clans began suffering from a severe drop in both playerbase and ratings as a result of releasing a very poorly received Town Hall 11 update by December 2015. Common complaints include the severely increasing difficulty of finding loot due to shield changes, the complete and total nerf to Town Hall sniping due to them giving no shield at all that upsets a lot of players along with the Personal Break Timer that punishes players just for having a successful defense.
• Fans of the Crash Bandicoot series generally consider the departure of series creator Naughty Dog in 2000 to be the start of the series' descent into mediocrity, with Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex and Crash Nitro Kart being seen as uninspired copies of Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped and Crash Team Racing respectively. An attempt was made to freshen up the series with Crash Twinsanity, but while it did meet a better reception from series fans, its Obvious Beta status caused it to sell poorly. Radical Entertainment would proceed to release Crash of the Titans and Crash: Mind Over Mutant, which received a mixed reception and led to the series going into hibernation for eight years until the well-received Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy and Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled released, and even a brand-new platformer installment in the form of the cheekily-titled Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time, marking the end of Crash's Audience-Alienating Era for the time being.
• Most have agreed Danganronpa has entered such an era, although there's disagreement over whether 2014's Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls or 2016's Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School started it. The former received a mixed reception for its unpolished third-person shooter gameplay and a particularly infamous sequence which detractors argued treated girl-on-girl sexual violence as a joke, while the latter was a Sequel in Another Medium criticized for several Fan Disliked Explanations, particularly when it came to its mastermind, a mostly less compelling new cast mainly consisting of Red Shirts and Mauve Shirts, several accusations of Plot Armor being given to the old cast, and an ending that received sharply divided responses for ramping up the preferential treatment of the returning characters. While the Soft Reboot Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony released in 2017 attempted to Win Back the Crowd with its gameplay improvements, it too became a massive Contested Sequel for several controversial story beats, most notoriously initial protagonist Kaede Akamatsu being executed at the end of Chapter 1, the actual murder cases continuing to follow patterns set by the preceding games, and another Audience-Alienating Ending interpreted by many, particularly Japanese fans, as an outright meanspirited Take That, Audience! intended to Torch the Franchise and Run. The next spin-off Danganronpa S: Ultimate Summer Camp came and went in 2021 without much fanfare, and couple all that with series creator Kazutaka Kodaka leaving Spike Chunsoft following Killing Harmony's release, fans are quite pessimistic about the possibility of a new mainline installment that could bring Danganronpa out of its audience-alienating era.
• The DmC: Devil May Cry era could be seen as this to the Devil May Cry franchise. Originally announced as a prequel in 2010, the game, which was being developed by Ninja Theory, was routinely savaged by fans for taking many liberties with the source material (making a series noted for its Camp Darker and Edgier, throwing in shallow satire...). Even shunting it into its own continuity did little to alleviate complaints. Not helping matters was director Tameem Antoniades dishing out several potshots at the fanbase for not liking the game, and still expecting them to buy it. Not surprisingly, the game flopped when it was released in 2013. Though Capcom would attempt to Win Back the Crowd by releasing the Special Edition of Devil May Cry 4 in 2015^note which managed to outsell the Definitive Edition of DmC, which was also released that year, a proper fifth entry in the classic series wouldn't come until 2019. Fortunately, Devil May Cry 5 was much closer in tone and style to the first four games and earned acclaim as a return to form, ending the audience-alienating era for now. ^note That said, 5 did also take some parts from the reboot, such as dialogue during gameplay, Boss Subtitles, Dante going through his old childhood home and receiving a Next Tier Power-Up, and Final Boss Vergil utilizing his DmC counterpart's Doppelganger Style in his battle.
• Many Dota 2 players criticize versions 6.81 and 6.83 for having strategically one-dimensional metagame. 6.81 is known as "The Deathball Patch" because winning a few early-game fights gave such a huge advantage that the team could simply proceed to move as five and completely steamroll the enemy. This led to very predictable picks (you were lucky to have a single match without Death Prophet, Faceless Void, Razor or Brewmaster) and matches were considered rather boring in general because the end result was usually determined before the 15 minute mark. 6.82 aimed to rectify these issues by granting bonus gold and XP for killing players with an advantage, thus giving the losing team a chance to make a comeback, but 6.83 (often called "The Rubber Band/Comeback Patch") went right into the opposite extreme by further increasing those bonuses. Gaining early-game dominance was effectively meaningless because certain carry heroes such as Sniper (whose Annoying Laugh also provides the other name for 6.83, "The HOHO HAHA Patch"), Juggernaut and Troll Warlord (needless to say, you saw these heroes in almost every match) could easily turn the entire match around after scoring couple of inevitable kills and assists during high-ground defense and gaining enough gold to buy their core items.
• The first two games in the Double Dragon series were pretty successful at the arcade and on consoles. The first NES game even sold out on the day of its release. But then came Double Dragon 3, which was farmed out to an external developer, featured a poorly-thought out plot involving Mineral MacGuffins, flat level designs, fewer moves than its predecessors, and an ill-conceived shopping gimmick obviously added as a transparent means of inserting more tokens into the machine. There were a couple more Double Dragon sequels after the third game, but the series never quite recovered from there: the NES version of the third game (while considered to be an improvement from the arcade version) is ridiculously hard, the SNES-exclusive fourth game was an Obvious Beta, and the last two games made before Technos went out of business were standard competitive fighting games that did nothing to stand out from an already overcrowded market. The movie "adaptation" of the series wasn't helping matters either... Thankfully, WayForward's 2012 reimagining is commonly seen as having done justice to the Double Dragon name (while not being afraid to make some jokes at its expense either). Unfortunately, the remake of Double Dragon II that followed (not developed by WayForward) proceeded to extinguish that goodwill. Then, that got followed up by Double Dragon IV, a divisive sequel to the original games from a developer with a usually good track record.
• The Dungeon Keeper mobile "game", the first after several years in franchise limbo, not only angered fans but also created a media fallout that ended in Mythic Games' death.
• Fallout:
  • There are ten years between Black Isle's Fallout 2 and Bethesda Softworks' Fallout 3. There are two Fallout games between them — Microforte's Fallout Tactics and Interplay's In Name Only Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. Tactics was a competent game, albeit one that had severe issues with staying within the established continuity (in a world where World War III was brought on by a crippling energy crisis, many bases have full drums of fuel just lying around more than a hundred years later, et cetera). The same cannot be said of Brotherhood, a second-rate Baldur's Gate clone with a paper-thin Fallout veneer and much greater continuity errors. Bethesda has proclaimed Tactics to be Broad Strokes canon, while Brotherhood is full-on Canon Discontinuity.
  • Most fans will agree that at least part of the Bethesda era of Fallout games is an Audience-Alienating Era, the only debate being over when the Audience-Alienating Era began. Some put it as far back as Fallout 3 for heavily streamlining the gameplay and storytelling, often while pointing to the much-better-received Fallout: New Vegas, which was also a First-Person Shooter built on the same engine as 3, as "3 done right" (its studio, Obsidian Entertainment, was founded by many people who worked on the first two games), though that game also has plenty of defenders who view it as a great translation of classic Fallout to the expectations of modern gamers, and New Vegas as an Even Better Sequel. Both 3's defenders and detractors, however, are unlikely to be favorable to Fallout 4, which many felt took the problems of 3 and blew them up to poster size, and even that game's defenders outright recoiled at Fallout 76, an attempt at an online "live service" Fallout game that quickly became notorious for crippling bugs and a long series of PR disasters on the part of Bethesda. The general consensus is that, wherever the Audience-Alienating Era started, Fallout is definitely in a bad one now, and likely will be for as long as Bethesda controls the franchise.
• Gran Turismo:
  • Gran Turismo 5, the series' debut on the PlayStation 3, was delayed for years and was reportedly a nightmare for Polyphony Digital to work on. When it finally released in 2010, it was a massive sales success,^note It was not only the second-best-selling game in the series behind Gran Turismo 3 on the PlayStation 2, it was the second-best-selling PS3 game overall behind only Grand Theft Auto V. but while reviews were solid, it came in for criticism for how its roster of cars was padded with vehicle models recycled from the PlayStation 2 games with just an HD remaster instead of new, high-polygon models. The difference between the "premium" cars that looked like they belonged in a PS3 game and the "standard" cars taken from the PS2 entries was obvious, starting with the fact that the premium cars were the only ones with fully-rendered interiors. When Gran Turismo 6 once again used "standard" cars from the PS2 games, fans criticized Polyphony for laziness, especially since the game introduced microtransactions. As such, while many saw it as a better game than its predecessor, sales of 6 were only half those of 5.
  • And then came the series' lone PlayStation 4 entry, 2017's Gran Turismo Sport, whose early years left even many who defended 5 and 6 feeling cold. Abandoning the series' trademark "CarPG" formula, including a lot of the tuning, in favor of an online-focused model built around e-sports that required a constant internet connection was, needless to say, a bitterly polarizing move for much of the fanbase. It didn't help that the vehicle and track rosters were greatly slimmed down compared to past games, with many of the cars being fictional race-tuned versions of the production cars (seen by a number of fans as glorified Palette Swaps) and the game's online structure heavily leaning on them, further alienating those for whom the appeal of a simulation racer was racing and collecting real, painstakingly-recreated production vehicles. Things got better over time, as Polyphony greatly expanded the number of tracks and cars available and, most importantly, added a proper single-player mode like the older games in the form of the GT League events — all for free. The general consensus is that, by the end of its life cycle, GT Sport at least had some value for people who weren't interested in multiplayer, even if its single-player offerings were still lacking compared to competitors like Forza. Gran Turismo 7 further indicated that Polyphony has listened to the criticisms of GT Sport, its single-player mode returning to the "CarPG" formula for the series' PlayStation 5 debut while keeping GT Sport's multiplayer content as well. As such, while some fans still criticize various design elements (its microtransactions, it remaining an always-online game, the fact that certain high-end cars are only available for a limited time), 7 is seen as having restored the series' pride.
• The Harvest Moon fandom is torn on what time period their Audience-Alienating Era spans but it's generally thought to have began around Magical Melody and DS. The characters are seen as shallower, several disliked mechanics have been tried out, and the series as a whole got Lighter and Softer. It got worse when Marvelous said they were focusing on handhelds instead of consoles; and it shows as they released six DS games but only two, near identical Wii games. Even Yasuhiro Wada has shown dislike to the way the games have gotten; he especially dislikes how much focus romance is given within the series. That said, the Wii games were acclaimed (though they still weren't perfect) and the 3DS game, A New Beginning, is seen as an improvement over the past handheld installments.
• While the Daniel Craig era of James Bond films is overall popular among fans of the series (albeit with its ups and downs), the Bond games from that era are another matter entirely. Starting with GoldenEye: Rogue Agent, Electronic Arts and then Activision took turns milking the franchise with games that were usually regarded as So Okay, It's Average at best, with only GoldenEye (2010) receiving truly positive reviews — and even that game produces a Broken Base among fans of the original Nintendo 64 GoldenEye. The games bottomed out in 2012 with 007 Legends, which met such a bad reception that it's rumored that Eon Productions pulled the license from Activision in order to stop them from making new Bond games and sullying the brand any further (which would explain why all of the Activision Bond games were pulled from online stores just over two months after it came out). It would take another eight years for a new Bond game (by IO Interactive) to be so much as announced.
• Katamari Damacy was going through this for most of the 2010's. Touch My Katamari was released in 2011 and panned by fans for the short length, problematic plot, and bizzare decision to fuse several of the cousins together. Being released on a commercial failure of a handheld (whose audience wouldn't be interested in a game like Katamari anyway) certainly didn't help. After that, there was little activity from the franchise outside of the occasional crossover and the short run of the Shifty Look comics. Following a few years of inactivity, Namco released two mobile games in 2016, Tap my Katamari and Amazing Katamari Damacy. While the latter was shut down due to low success, fans were happy to see Bandai Namco giving the franchise some attention again. The era would finally end in 2018 with the release of Katamari Damacy: REROLL, along with a healthy amount of Fangamer merchandise and even a commemorative Loot Crate to celebrate the series' 15th Anniversary. With the release of We Love Katamari REROLL + Royal Reverie in the near future, the series is firmly out of the era and back on track.
• The Leisure Suit Larry series has the infamous games starring Larry Lovage (Magna Cum Laude and Box Office Bust). It is worth noting that Al Lowe, the series' creator, isn't involved with either of them. Judging by his site, he'd be more than happy to give them advice, and is also more than happy he wasn't involved when the games bombed. The most recent game to be released, Wet Dreams Don't Dry, has managed to Win Back the Crowd, meaning that Larry's audience-alienating era has come to an end for the moment.
• Mega Man was hit with this around the Turn of the Millennium, hard. In the late 80's and early-to-mid 90's, Mega Man had mostly two series between Mega Man (Classic) and Mega Man X, and while there was a fair amount of Capcom Sequel Stagnation for Classic, X was gaining its footing on the PlayStation. Around the same time, there was another spinoff series in Mega Man Legends doing its own thing as 3D action-adventure games. Then came Mega Man X6, which was so Christmas Rushed out the door with ten months of development time that it infamously tainted the brand going forwards, around the same time that Mega Man Battle Network and Mega Man Zero kicked up. For the next few years, X, Battle Network and Zero all had to compete with eachother for market relevance as the sales saw a notable growth and decline amidst conflicted consumers and split fans, and Mega Man X7 would further hinder the X brand with the Video Game 3D Leap being an abject failure while Mega Man Battle Network 4: Red Sun and Blue Moon was also rushed out the door in such a drastic quality drop that all the games started selling worse after it; even a pair of attempts to reboot Classic and X with a pair of 2.5D remakes were left to flounder and rot on the PlayStation Portable. By the time Mega Man ZX and Mega Man Star Force had launched in the late 00's with controversial changes to the Zero and Battle Network formulas respectively, the damage was so bad that the series saw rapidly declining sales before flatlining for almost an entire decade, even with a pair of Classic Retraux titles that did decently well. It would take until 2018 for Mega Man 11 to revitalize the brand with a genuinely new release — and that only ended up being the best selling game in the series in September 2022, four years later.
• Mortal Kombat was another fighting series that went through this.
  • Mortal Kombat 3 and its Updated Re-release Ultimate tweaked the familiar gameplay formula to add a few improvements, but the creative decision to mix a Darker and Edgier storyline with a significantly Denser and Wackier aesthetic and tone left all but the most competitively-focused players scratching their heads. In addition to leaving out fan-favorite Scorpion in the first release (which Ultimate wisely fixed), many character designs were notably cheesier than before and the series' iconic fatalities became much more cartoonish and silly. Many fatalities look outright comical in their laziness when compared to their gruesome presentation in Mortal Kombat II, with dismemberment resembling a cut-up photograph and explosions raining down dozens of skulls, femurs and ribcages from a single victim. It didn't take the franchise completely off a cliff (gameplay-wise, it still holds up as well as its predecessor), but it did cause a great deal of the series' "cool" factor to dissipate, quickly erased its reputation as an infamous pop-cultural touchstone (Moral Guardians went from dreading the very name "Mortal Kombat" to forgetting it existed practically overnight), and heralded the fall that was to come.
  • After Mortal Kombat 4 made a poorly-executed Video Game 3D Leap, the series seemed to have reached a stalemate with a largely undistinguishable (except for an expanded character roster) Updated Re-release for Dreamcast, Mortal Kombat Gold, and the PlayStation-exclusive Mortal Kombat: Special Forces, an utterly horrible action spin-off. In the wake of this, John Tobias jumped ship from the creative team, and the series laid low as the gaming industry entered its new generation — between Special Forces and the next entry in the series, there was a three-year gap.
  • The trilogy of Deadly Alliance, Deception, and Armageddon are not remembered as fondly as they were received. Deadly Alliance once again totally revamped the series' basic mechanics, for better or for worse, and introduced a few hit-or-miss characters while omitting classic ones, including killing off Liu Kang. Deception only doubled down on both of those things, but did bring Liu Kang back as a zombie and "brought back the nostalgia characters". Finally, Armageddon replaced the unique Fatalities with attack chains to accommodate for all the characters present and a bizarre backstory, for which the developers didn't even release all the characters' bios (17 out of a possible 62).
  • And then there was Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, which can be seen as Midway trying to figure out what to do with the series. It's not necessarily a bad game, but it's a firm indicator of Mortal Kombat's Audience-Alienating Era, because the simple fact of it being rated T by ESRB (due to the DC superheroes) made this game a standout, and not in a positive way: it meant a lot of what players knew of MK would be inevitably Bowdlerised (mainly the explicit Gorn, which was reduced to the odd blood spill here and there, and censored Fatalities — even more so than the home versions of the original game). It ultimately took Midway filing for bankruptcy and seeing its assets acquired by WB Games for the series to get back on track - the bankruptcy/acquisition period allowed for Midway Studios (now reincarnated as NetherRealm Studios) to sort out what worked and what didn't work and then return the series to form with the well-received Mortal Kombat 9, as well as using their experience on the DC end of things to turn out Injustice: Gods Among Us, a cool all-DC fighting game. There's a (mostly-joking) conspiracy theory that WB deliberately gimped MK vs. DC in order to facilitate their buyout of Midway.
• It's widely agreed that the Need for Speed franchise had one, but when it happened depends on who you ask, as there's a considerable Broken Base between "exotic" fans, who prefer the games when they're focused on supercars and exotic locales, and "tuner" fans, who prefer car customization and city racing.
  • Exotic fans tend to list everything from the first game in 1994 through Hot Pursuit 2 in 2002 as the series' "classic" era and its golden age, and the "Black Box era" (after developer EA Black Box) that started with 2003's Underground as the beginning of the end. Tuner fans, however, regard Underground and its 2004 sequel, as well as 2005's Most Wanted, as some of the series' best games for their heavier focus on illegal street racing and introduction of in-depth vehicle customization, especially once Underground 2 added an open-world environment. 2006's Carbon and 2008's Undercover, on the other hand, were seen as lower-quality retreads of Underground and Most Wanted, with Undercover coming in for especially heated criticism for its glaring bugs (particularly frame rate issues, a kiss of death in a high-speed racing game) and a storyline that felt like it was trying too hard, especially when compared side-by-side with Midnight Club: Los Angeles and Burnout Paradise, two similar but far better received open-world street racing games released in the same year. Between them, Carbon and Undercover are typically cited even by tuner fans as when the series lost its way.
  • Of special note here is 2007's ProStreet, an Oddball in the Series released between Carbon and Undercover that divided both exotic and tuner fans, particularly with its greater focus on realism built around organized, daytime track meets. Exotic fans loved its selection of high-end sports cars, tuner fans embraced its customization, and both sides enjoyed its realistic damage model, but the move to closed circuit professional racing caused many fans to feel that the series was losing its soul and turning too serious by trying to copy Gran Turismo. In hindsight, however, it's received a lot of praise for having tried something new after the failure of Carbon, especially with how its "simcade" racing style and music festival aesthetic wound up influential on a lot of racing games in the 2010s, such as the GRID and Forza Horizon series. It would receive a Spiritual Successor in 2009's similarly well-received Shift, which in turn got a standalone sequel in 2011 and later inspired its developer Slightly Mad Studios to make the very similar Project CARS after they left EA.
  • After the failure of Undercover, 2010's Hot Pursuit saw the series given to Criterion Games, and it marked the beginning of the "Autolog era" (after the online social gameplay system introduced with this game) spanning the early 2010s where the series would cater far more to exotic fans than tuner fans. Naturally, exotic fans tend to like this era and regard it as a comeback for the series (and warmly embraced the news of Hot Pursuit 2010's Updated Re-release in 2020), while tuner fans generally regard it as the series' point of no return. 2011's The Run was criticized at the time for its lack of content and wound up as the final nail in EA Black Box's coffin, but since then, its beautiful graphics, highly cinematic presentation, and Cannonball Run-inspired plot have caused it to be rediscovered as a hidden gem. The 2012 Most Wanted game, however, has not been so lucky, seen by many tuner fans (who regard the 2005 Most Wanted as a Sacred Cow) as a reskinned Burnout sequel with a near-total lack of customization, a weird handling model, and some Scrappy Mechanics. The 2010 free-to-play online game World was also controversial for its grindy, pay-to-win nature.
  • After that, however, came the "Ghost Games era," which more or less united exotic and tuner fans in feeling that the series had gone into a ditch. Ghost's first game, 2013's exotic-focused Rivals (made in collaboration with Criterion), is regarded as just alright, lacking personality, and bearing an annoying inability to pause. The 2015 reboot tried to go back to the tuner well, but while its graphics were praised, its always-online functionality, recycled driving physics, and out-of-control Rubber-Band A.I. weren't. 2017's Payback deepened the hole, between its cliched story and annoying characters and, worse, its loot-box upgrade system and use of microtransactions that were seen as annoying, greedy, and exploitative in a full-priced game. In response to these criticisms, 2019's Heat dialed back the most controversial elements of prior games and balanced both the exotic and tuner sides of the series, and while its underperformance in sales got Ghost pulled off the series in favor of bringing Criterion back for 2022's Unbound, those who actually played it generally regarded it as a return to form.
• The Pac-Man franchise has had two.
  • The first Audience-Alienating Era started around the mid-1980s and lasted into the early-to-mid 1990s. Around this time, the series found itself stagnating, with little except ports of the arcade games that were often considered dated compared to their contemporaries on the SNES and Sega Genesis. Namco would attempt to experiment with titles like the polarizing Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures and Pac-in-Time, a Dolled-Up Installment of Fury of the Furries, but none of these made the series any more popular or relevant. The only real successful titles released during this era were Pac-Attack (a reskin of Cosmo Gang: The Puzzle) and Pac-Mania. This Audience-Alienating Era came to an end in 1999 with the release of Pac-Man World on the PlayStation.
  • The second Audience-Alienating Era is often considered to be around 2009, when Namco Bandai decided to reboot the brand, introducing a prototype of their redesign in Pac-Man Party, a Mario Party clone that earned mediocre reviews and unimpressive sales. Then Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures was announced, along with a tie-in video game series and a whole line of toys. The show gained massive amounts of negative publicity right out of the gate, and along with Sonic Boom and (occasionally) Mega Man: Fully Charged is often considered the poster boy for unnecessary video game redesigns.
    
    Championship Edition DX proceeded to outsell both Ghostly Adventures games combined. Possibly because of this and Masahiro Sakurai's decision to include the classic design in Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U, Namco seemed to start listening to fan backlash, as merchandising and advertisements featuring Pac-Man's redesign were slowly phased out in flavor of his iconic Pie-Eyed design. All Pac-Man games that followed ditched this redesign as well.
• The Puyo Puyo series fell into one during 1998-2001, due to Puyo Puyo~n coming down with a bad case of Sequelitis and Compile frantically trying to Follow the Leader with various fads at the time like DanceDanceRevolution and Pokémon in a desperate attempt to stave off bankruptcy (which didn't really work out for them in the end). There was also a push for a unified timeline, which ended up creating a Broken Base amongst the fanbase (the newer crowd loved it, while the old guard... didn't). In fact, some would argue that the series started to show signs of the audience-alienating era in Puyo Puyo Sun, which ended up getting a mixed reception in the arcades as well as Compile exploiting the franchise' popularity with a glut of games in order to avoid the aforementioned bankruptcy. It should also be noted that this was when Sega owned the series and yet Compile still had near-complete control. When Sega later claimed full rights to the series after Compile's demise, they at first tried to keep it in tone with the older games with Puyo Pop for the Game Boy Advance, before opting for a Soft Reboot altogether, throwing in a new setting with new characters with Puyo Puyo Fever. It wouldn't be until 15th Anniversary when the older Compile-era characters would start making a return, albeit with a few tweaks to fit in with Sega's new setting.
• Ratchet & Clank entered one in the later stages of the PlayStation 3 generation. After the beloved Ratchet & Clank Future saga wrapped up in 2009, the next game in the series was All 4 One in 2011, a top-down four player co-op adventure with a vastly de-emphasized story, followed the next year by Full Frontal Assault, a smaller digital-focused game with third-person tower defense gameplay and even less story. Sales and fan attention dwindled to the point that the next traditional game, 2013's Into the Nexus, was a shorter-length budget title, which didn't make any sort of splash and relegated the franchise as washed-up with far too many releases that nobody asked for. It wouldn't be until the PS4 game based on the movie came out in 2016 that the series saw an uptick: the public were reminded of how great a traditional Ratchet & Clank can play and look despite being a slightly cheaper release, setting the stage for Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart to knock it out of the park in 2021 at the start of the PlayStation 5's life.
• The Rayman series has the infamous Rabbid era from 2006 to 2008. The fourth game in the series introduced Rabbids, one-joke characters who don't do anything but scream "DAAAAAAAAAAAH" at the top of their lungs. Due to Executive Meddling, the game, originally planned as a platformer like its predecessors, shifted into a party game (though the Game Boy Advance version was still made a platformer). In the next two games, the Rabbids ended up stealing the entire show and the eponymous hero was demoted to Butt-Monkey. Fortunately, Rabbids Go Home, the next game involving the Rabbids, removed Rayman entirely, while Rayman himself came back in force in his own adventure in Rayman Origins, though interestingly the Rabbids themselves have not only an animated series on Nickelodeon but a crossover with (of all series) Super Mario Bros., which ended up winning critical acclaim against all odds.
• While every game in the Resident Evil series has its defenders, the general consensus is that the late '00s and early '10s were a low point when it came to quality.
  • Resident Evil 5 in 2009 was controversial not just for various thematic elements within the game itself, but also, more importantly, for what was seen in hindsight as the turning point in a long process of tilting the series away from Survival Horror towards Action Horror. While this process started with Resident Evil 4 in 2005, it became far more apparent here, and many fans believe that it was Capcom's attempt to copy the success of Gears of War and Modern Warfare.^note Ironically, RE4 itself, with its revolutionary use of an Always Over the Shoulder camera in a Third-Person Shooter, wound up enormously influential on Gears of War and many of the other shooters that later games were accused of trying to copy — a point that was not lost on those RE fans who believe that RE4, as good as it was on its own merits, set off a negative long-term trend for the series. That said, RE5 still has its fans, many of whom are likely to claim that it was with the next main-series game that RE lost its way.
  • That game, Resident Evil 6, in 2012, doubled down on being an Actionized Sequel in such a manner that it invited itself to be judged as a Third-Person Shooter rather than a horror game, a genre where it was found to be wanting compared to the competition. Even Capcom later admitted in the Resident Evil 7: Biohazard Document File that, while RE6 sold well, it left a lot of longtime fans cold. The spinoffs during this time, particularly Operation Raccoon City that same year, merely fed into the perception that the series had lost the plot, with only Revelations that year getting a good reception — and that game was a Nintendo 3DS exclusive that was only later ported to consoles. It didn't help that, during this time, indie horror games were experiencing a renaissance led by titles like Amnesia: The Dark Descent, P.T., Outlast, DayZ, and Five Nights at Freddy's, which made the state of RE even more unfavorable in comparison.
  • Those indie horror games wound up being the inspiration for how the series pulled itself back together and ended its Audience-Alienating Era. The spinoff Revelations 2 in 2015 (which was released on consoles from the start, Capcom recognizing how its predecessor became a Sleeper Hit after it was ported to consoles) and the mainline title Resident Evil 7: Biohazard in 2017 drew heavily from the aforementioned games in how they brought the series back to basics with an emphasis on pure scares, and served to win back many longtime fans. Since then, new RE games have mostly received good-to-great receptions and struck a stronger balance of action and horror, and the series is once again viewed as the last word in horror gaming.
• Roblox users often dispute when it started, but the game suffered from this the most starting from 2016. At the beginning, high profile gaming YouTubers like DanTDM started to play, resulting in a massive Newbie Boom mainly consisting of very young children, and Roblox's subsequent heavy marketing to them which alienated many veteran players. Tickets were abruptly discontinued in March of that year, making free-to-play users unable to obtain any clothing except items given out for free. In August an AI-based filter called Communify Sift was implemented in the games, chat, and forums. But it was 2017 when the Audience-Alienating Era began to accelerate. Starting out that year with a logo redesign that gained mixed to negative reception. Bad publicity from mainstream news sites resulted in the Community Sift filter going crazy and censoring even simple words like pronouns and conjunctions. In July the forums were reduced to be about Roblox only, then removed altogether at the beginning of December. Guest players were also removed so that the site could get more users, despite the fact that many if not most accounts on the site are inactive or alts.
• Rock Band's "hardcore" fan base often think 2012 is an audience-alienating era for their Downloadable Content. Most of the new releases now come in threes and with only one Pro Guitar/Bass upgrade, and a not insignificant amount of them are from the (often late) Turn of the Millennium and The New '10s which they stereotypically consider "crappy." (Nothing really exciting for them was released minus an Iron Maiden 6-pack and a Slayer pack.) Plus, they are often considered "too easy."
• RuneScape is often considered to have gone through this after the game's creators, the Gower brothers, handed off its reigns to Mark Gerhard, one of the senior mods. This is mostly related to two controversial gameplay changes Gerhard introduced: first, the implementation of microtransactions, something the Gowers promised they would never do, and second, a complete overhaul of the combat system which was seen by numerous fans as a cynical attempt to ape World of Warcraft. Jagex heard the criticisms of the combat system and as a result introduced both "Old School" worlds that allow players to experience the game as it was in 2007, and a poll wherein players voted to introduce the option to toggle between the old and new combat systems on the main worlds, as well. On the plus side, Gerhard's tenure also coincided with some very well-received advances to the game's Myth Arc, including tying up plot points that had been dangling for nearly a decade.
• Silent Hill is notorious for its horribly Broken Base, but most fans will agree that the series peaked with the first three games, and the franchise is near-unanimously agreed to have gone downhill since. The general summation of this is a reverence for "Team Silent" and a mistrust of the games in which this development team was not involved.
  • That said, the consensus is that Silent Hill 4: The Room, the last of the Team Silent entries, is where the slide began. It was a Dolled-Up Installment, and it shows; while many fans feel that it's perfectly alright as a standalone Survival Horror game, it diverges from series tradition in many ways, including downplaying the Otherworld, having the player go through every level twice, and featuring a Hub Level in the protagonist's apartment that takes place in a first-person perspective (unlike the rest of the game) and produces lots of needless backtracking for saves and inventory management.
  • Silent Hill: Origins, a prequel by the British developer Climax Studios, was the first game not developed by Team Silent. It was seen as a rather meager entry for having a main character whose own motivation and goal were rather vague at best and outright flimsy at worst, and having some rather glaring Series Continuity Errors.
  • Silent Hill: Homecoming, developed by the American developer Double Helix, was met with some degree of skepticism, as some fans felt that it was too slanted towards being an Actionized Sequel, too "Americanized", took too many cues from the somewhat controversial film adaptation, and favored Pandering to the Base over actual symbolism. On the whole, however, the game ended up being mostly seen as So Okay, It's Average.
  • Silent Hill: Shattered Memories broke the fanbase further, between those convinced that the series remained mired in suck and those who believe this entry was fresh and compelling enough to possibly signal a revival of the franchise. Its removal of combat entirely in favor of chase sequences was one of the biggest sticking points. While some felt these sequences to be innovative, intense, and a welcome break from the Actionized Sequel mold that the series had fallen into, and liked the focus on puzzle-solving that characterized the rest of the game, others felt that the chases were the only scary sequences in the game, since the Player Character couldn't die at any other point. Furthermore, it didn't even pretend to be canon with the rest of the series, instead serving as a loose remake of the first game with a Dead All Along twist. While some fans appreciated that the plot didn't get tangled in the series' lore, others were disappointed that it didn't move the Myth Arc forward.
  • Reception to Silent Hill: Downpour was far more positive. While it was clearly rushed out the door and filled with bugs (a problem that would also bedevil the Silent Hill HD Collection, an Updated Re-release of the second and third games that same year), those who soldiered through it praised it as a return to form in terms of atmosphere and pure frights, even if they felt that the monster design and combat were lacking.
  • Unfortunately, save for the Hack and Slash spinoff Silent Hill: Book of Memories later that year, it wound up as the last game in the series. The announcement of Silent Hills, a collaboration between Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro, got even the most jaded fans interested in the series again... until it got cancelled in a dreadful case of Screwed by the Publisher, which (along with the announcement of a Silent Hill pachinko machine) left many fans wishing the Ten Plagues on Konami and fearing that the series would never escape its Audience-Alienating Era.
  • After eight years of radio silence, 2022 saw a flurry of announcements: two all-new Silent Hill games in Silent Hill f (which boasted the involvement of Ryukishi07 as the story's writer) and Silent Hill: Townfall, an interactive streaming series called Silent Hill: Ascension, a new film adaptation by Christophe Gans (director of the first Silent Hill movie) called Return to Silent Hill, and a remake of Silent Hill 2. Unfortunately, the would-be "Silent Hill renaissance" got off on the worst possible foot in 2023 when Ascension was released to a scathing reception, with the storyline falling flat for many and the interactive series' microtransaction-heavy business model paired with its Audience Participation and voting mechanics leading to accusations of Bribing Your Way to Victory. Almost immediately, many fans condemned it as the worst thing the series had ever produced and a sign that Konami had learned nothing, and hopes for the other announced projects are low.
• SimCity (2013) capped off a long Audience-Alienating Era for the SimCity series. Many fans regard the fourth game, released in 2003, as the series' apex for both its addition of regions with many cities and its Hidden Depths gameplay-wise. However, it was followed up in 2007 by SimCity Societies, which many fans found to be painfully easy and extremely shallow. The 2013 game was billed as a return to form, but its launch was plagued by disastrous server issues that rendered it, with its focus on online connectivity and multiplayer, unplayable for weeks. Worse, even after the server issues were fixed, people who sat down to play it found it once more to be heavily simplified, with the small map sizes and lack of terrain features in particular greatly restricting the kinds of cities that could be built. Not even the Cities of Tomorrow expansion was able to fully salvage the game. The failures of the 2013 game, in fact, led directly to Paradox Interactive giving the green light to Cities: Skylines, a Spiritual Successor to the older SimCity games that was overtly marketed to fans disappointed with the later installments.
• Fans of The Sims will defend the first two games until the day they die, seeing the first as a revolutionary landmark in gaming history and the second as an Even Better Sequel that built on the first game's solid foundation... but after that, there's a Broken Base between those who think that The Sims 3 put the series in an Audience-Alienating Era, and those who love 3 and instead think that The Sims 4 did so.
  • To this day, The Sims 3 gets a lot of flak for being very poorly optimized. At the time it was released, it required a beast of a computer to run and only got worse with each new Expansion Pack added, to the point where the launcher not only allowed players to deactivate any expansions they didn't want to run but outright recommended that they only run a few at a time. Even ten years later, some older computers can only run it on the lowest graphical settings. This was quite a problem for a series of games that, until then, were known for having a small hardware footprint. Much of this came down to its Wide-Open Sandbox design, allowing Sims to travel all across their neighborhoods with no loading screens — except for the initial one, which inevitably took a very long time. It also marked the point where the series' nickel-and-diming got truly out of control, most notably with the introduction of SimPoints to unlock items. That being said, by the 2020s the advance of computer technology made it far easier to run the game on a mid-range computer, especially with performance mods that fix the game's worst problems, causing it to be Vindicated by History for many simmers, especially those who took issue with the changes that 4 made. In particular, 3's fans will defend its open-world design, as well as the greater customization available for both clothing and items and a more realistic character design for Sims, one that would be fleshed out in the well-received spinoff The Sims Medieval.
  • Hence why the removal of those features from 4, with the neighborhoods broken up into smaller areas and items only having a few pre-selected colors and designs available, sparked controversy among the fanbase. This wasn't the end of it, either, as the game at launch did not have a number of features that past games had in their vanilla releases. Much of this can be attributed to last-minute design changes after the release of SimCity (2013). Maxis had originally intended for 4 to be built around online functionality much like that game was, but the new SimCity's sharply negative reception, with the online features singled out for criticism, forced them to hastily retool 4 into an offline single-player game, which not only took away time that could've been spent fleshing out the game's features but also left them building on the bones of a game that was originally intended to be played online. The game did slowly Win Back the Crowd, as free patches not only brought back things like ghosts, swimming pools, basements, family trees, babysitters, and toddlers, but also added new career options, some items, a neighborhood, half-walls, curved walls, L-shaped staircases, ladders, and even the ability to create transgender and non-binary Sims (a first for the series), on top of the usual expansion support (now without SimPoints). Many still miss the open world and customization options from 3 and feel that 4 regressed by abandoning them, but others argue that the game runs better without them and can once more be played on low-end computers, and praise the depth and ease of use of its own options for creating Sims and their houses. That said, while most fans agree that the game is better than it was at launch, persistent problems with expansions and DLC seen as unpolished and lacking content mean that the game is far from universally defended by simmers.
• The Soul Series made it big in 1999 and throughout the 2000s was one of the top dogs of the fighting game genre. That said, the 2010s were not a favorable decade for the series and nearly marked the death of Soulcalibur as a whole. It came in two waves:
  • The first was the 2012 B-Team Sequel Soulcalibur V, directed by Daishi Odashima, who forced a 17-year Time Skip on the series just to introduce a new cast to replace series regulars like Taki and Sophitia. The protagonist, Sophitia's son Patroklos, wound up so hated that players just didn't care about the story. Even disregarding the lack of familiar faces, the game was Christmas Rushed with little content anywhere, and the gameplay imitated Street Fighter (of which Odashima was a fan) to reach tournament players—but it failed at even that, and the game was quickly dropped. The game's floundering sales, along with tepid fan reception, led publisher Namco Bandai to pull the plug on the DLC, with Odashima leaving the team and disappearing into Sega's offices. Unfortunately, the series's fortunes didn't stop sinking there.
  • The second came in a series of subpar spin-offs helmed by Masaki Hoshino, when there was little interest in a true Soulcalibur sequel at the time. After the So Okay, It's Average HD remaster of Soulcalibur II, Namco released two digital-only titles: Soulcalibur: Lost Swords, a single-player free-to-play game with DRM, dumbed-down gameplay, microtransactions and even more shameless fanservice than usual; and Soulcalibur: Unbreakable Soul, a Card Battle Game for iOS. Both games were widely ignored as blatant cash-grabs and shut down within about a year of release. Adding insult to injury was the release of Soulcalibur Pachislot in January 2017 with no sixth game in sight.
  • Fortunately, the audience-alienating era was completely wiped away in 2018, when a new and proper Soulcalibur VI was finally released. The game addressed all of the problems with V, being a Continuity Reboot that returns to the old status quo, brings back the favorites that were missed, features more content and better story, and more original gameplay mechanics that helped the series stand on its own. It was one of the highest-rated fighters of the eighth generation, and its sales quickly outpaced that of V with Bandai Namco reporting it as successful. However, the new head of the series, Motohiro Okubo, stated that this had to happen for Soul to survive as Bandai Namco was very reluctant to publish another mainline Soulcalibur game after everything that happened, marking most of the 2010s as this definitively.
• For many SpongeBob SquarePants fans, SpongeBob SquarePants: Creature from the Krusty Krab was the last good SpongeBob Licensed Game. After that, the audience-alienating era began when THQ focused on creating more tie-in titles to cash in on the special episodes that were airing at the time, such as Atlantis Squarepantis and Truth or Square, which were either mediocre at best or just poor at worst. Then the audience-alienating era reached its ugly peak when THQ went bankrupt in 2013 and the license was handed over to Activision, which resulted in the poorly-received Plankton's Robotic Revenge and SpongeBob Heropants. However, by 2018, 3 years after Heropants' release, Activision officially lost the SpongeBob license, and the newly revived THQ Nordic managed to secure the deal with plans to release Nickelodeon games, which started with the remake SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom Rehydrated. With the success of Rehydrated and the subsequent announcement of a new original SpongeBob platformer, SpongeBob SquarePants: The Cosmic Shake, things have started to look up for the SpongeBob game franchise.
• Just like Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon faced a very similar decline after the original trilogy. Following the success of the first three games, Insomniac Games left to work on Ratchet & Clank; in the meantime, Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly would release to negative reception for being a Christmas Rushed mess of a video game with a short runtime, very obvious bugs (one glitch in the hub world even allows you to skip to the Final Boss instantly), and wonky gameplay. Spyro: A Hero's Tail was seen as a step-up from Enter the Dragonfly, but drew some hate because of its gameplay shift from portal-based to becoming a sandbox-styled game. And then came The Legend of Spyro trilogy, a Darker and Edgier reimagining of the series which garnered mixed-to-negative feedback for being a polarizing Continuity Reboot with a change to combat-based gameplay. These games were so poorly received that the franchise went into hibernation for a decade, with Spyro's major appearances in the Skylanders franchise being the only things released around this time. The series officially got out of its slump with the release of Spyro Reignited Trilogy and his appearance as a new racer in an update for Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled. While the Reignited Trilogy is the only new game released so far, it's safe to say that Spyro has officially returned to his former glory.
• SSX fans may disagree as to whether or not Tricky or 3 was the best game, but it's generally agreed that the series started losing its touch with On Tour, which was still decent but dialed back the character and zaniness that had become emblematic of the franchise. Blur, the series' entry on the Wii, brought back the larger-than-life personalities but polarized fans with its motion controls, while SSX 2012 went Darker and Edgier in such a manner that left fans cold (even after those elements were toned down from the original Deadly Descents trailer). The franchise has been dormant since.
• Star Trek Online, if what has been said on the official forums is true, has been in this position since Season 8.5. 8.5 saw the removal of the Hourly Events in favor of weekend events, which cheesed off players due to the fact that players used the Bonus Marks 3-hour event to grind marks for their Fleets. The start of this season also gave out a special event ship for the 4th anniversary, only to have it put behind a time gate due to the extra bells and whistles that went with it, a major deviation from year 2 and 3's ships. It got worse come Season 9, when it was revealed that the Reputation Powers players could get no longer stacked and that they were limited to 8 passives — four space and four ground — in an attempt to curb Power Creep before it got way out of hand. It also infuriated certain players because of the usage of Undine ships for Lockbox prizes and Lobi offerings, as many players felt that doing so broke canon and that Cryptic had promised them that they would never use the Undine as Lockbox prizes.
• Star Wars games have been stuck in one since 2006 thanks to the shenanigans of LucasArts, Electronic Arts, and Disney. After the success of Empire at War, LucasArts underwent a serious turnover of executives that left the company in a dysfunctional state with mass layoffs and game cancellations. George Lucas's demands earned much bad blood between staff and leadership as he would make unreasonable demands in mid-development. ^note Most notably, partway through the development of the now defunct Star Wars 1313, Lucas mandated that game would star Boba Fett, leading to the team scrapping 3 months of work. Since then the only games released were two The Force Unleashed titles, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and a Kinect game; all of these games have received mixed reviews and performed below expectations with the Kinect game becoming a target of mockery among pundits. The underwhelming output led to Disney shuttering LucasArts in 2013 after buying out parent company LucasFilm.
  
  And things only went from bad to worse when Disney gave EA the exclusive rights to make Star Wars games starting in 2013. In the same year that the agreement was finalized, the executives who oversaw negotiations departed from the company. Their replacements, however, weren't involved in the original negotiations and thus didn't seem interested making new Star Wars games. CEO Andrew Wilson in particular was rumored to have hated the deal since EA would have to surrender profits and creative control to Disney, leading to their Star Wars games becoming treated as Contractual Obligation Projects. From 2013 to 2018, EA released only two Battlefront games, both of which were disappointments for fans with the first entry getting criticized for being rushed to market with minimal content while the sequel was mired in a massive loot box controversy that involved manipulative and aggressive monetization in a retail game, as well as a mediocre The Sims 4 tie-in with the Journey to Batuu game pack have extremely negative reaction from fans who see it as sellout to a game ridiculed for its lack of features and expensive monetization of expansion and content packs. EA also cancelled single player action-adventure games, including one that was supposed to be overseen by Amy Hennig of Uncharted fame, out of a belief that linear games didn't appealed to casual audiences and couldn't be heavily monetized. Nowadays, many see the Disney-era Star Wars games as low-effort cash grabs compared to other licensed games like Spider-Man (PS4) and the Batman: Arkham Series. It didn't help matters that Disney CEO Bob Iger stated that he is happy with continuing to license Star Wars to EA if only because it would provide low-risk stream of revenue for Disney. The Audience-Alienating Era would show signs of reprieve in 2019 with the critical and commercial success of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, a Dark Souls/Uncharted-esque single-player experience with no monetization, followed a year later by the similarly well-received Star Wars: Squadrons. The 2021 announcement that the Lucasfilms Games brand would be revived and that Disney would begin allowing other studios to handle Lucasfilms licenses (while still working with EA) gave further optimism to fans of a potential end to the Audience-Alienating Era.
  • The makers of the MMO Star Wars: Galaxies decided it wasn't successful enough, so they came up with the "New Game Experience", which involved massive changes to the game mechanics, combat system, character classes, and everything else, in the hope of attracting a whole new demographic. The result was an existing player base that was thoroughly (and vocally) pissed off, a new player base that never materialised, and a huge drop in subscriptions (not officially admitted, but confirmed by user-written in-game surveying tools before the company caught on and disabled the tools). Other MMOs have done similar things on a less spectacular scale, but SWG's NGE is the infamous example everyone points to. One of the major reasons for this is that the developers changed the way one becomes a Jedi. Originally, players had to find a holocron and master whatever class tree it said to master, then the player may luck out and become a Jedi, or would receive another holocron and continue the cycle until they eventually became a Jedi. This, naturally, would be a grind. The New Game Experience let players start as a Jedi. Not only did this mean that everyone picked to be a Jedi while avoiding every other class, and pissing off those people unlucky enough to have had to master every class to become a Jedi before then, but it also royally futzed with the franchise's canon. You had many thousands of Jedi running around in the open when at that time in the official storyline, the only true, trained Jedi still living was Yoda. Just how bad is it? A new Star Wars MMO, handled by Knights of the Old Republic developer BioWare and set in the KoToR timeline to justify letting everyone be a Jedi, has since came along.
• Street Fighter actually inverted this. When the Street Fighter III series came out, many people were turned off by all the changes and many dropped the series altogether. As time has passed however, many (namely the eSports crowd) looked back and were able to view the SFIII series, specifically the third iteration, 3rd Strike, much more favorably.
• The Tales Series went through a rough patch following Tales of Vesperia. All the games after Vesperia had technical problems due to being released unfinished, and having generally weaker stories, with notable games like Tales of Graces having to be re-released on new consoles due to the original launch being so buggy. Meanwhile, while Tales of Xillia and Tales of Xillia 2 were well received games, they had enough gameplay, content, and story issues that made them divisive. The next game, Tales of Zestiria ended up being more divisive due to its relatively short length, underdeveloped plot, obtuse equipment system, and a battle system that was seen as a weaker imitation of the Tales of Graces system. This era came to an end with the release of Zestiria's prequel, Tales of Berseria, which was seen as a return to form for the series with both stronger writing and better gameplay.
• The Tetris: The Grand Master series got better with each new release for its first three installments. Then came the very un-TGM-like Xbox 360 title Tetris: The Grand Master ACE, the tragic byproduct of The Tetris Company's and Microsoft's Executive Meddling. Most of the trademark TGM gameplay mechanics have been stripped (including Master Mode, and by extension the unique TGM-style leveling up and grade system), you get a variation of infinite spin (limit of 128 rotations and 128 movements) as opposed to TGM's "step reset" lock delay, and you need an Xbox Live Gold membership to unlock proper TGM rotation. It's considered an okay Tetris game, but a bad TGM game.
• Fans of the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater franchise believe that it peaked with Pro Skater 2 through 4 and Tony Hawk's Underground, and that it lost its luster in the latter half of the '00s but didn't really fall off a cliff until the '10s.
  • While 2004's Underground 2 was still seen as rock-solid in terms of the core skateboarding gameplay, the juvenile humor (including featuring the cast of Jackass) turned off a lot of players, as did the vehicular and on-foot segments, both of which seemed to indicate that developer Neversoft was running out of ideas. It wasn't until the seventh generation, however, that the franchise truly grew stagnant as annualization took its toll. 2005's American Wasteland was praised for toning down Underground 2's Denser and Wackier elements but criticized for a Wide-Open Sandbox map that felt poorly thought-out and over-reliant on Dynamic Loading in the form of bland corridors separating various areas, as well as gameplay that felt easier than before. 2006's Project 8 attempted to take the series back to basics, but the "Nail the Trick" feature felt gimmicky, and more importantly, it was plagued by Obvious Beta bugs and a poor framerate. Finally, 2007's Proving Ground went Darker and Edgier and doubled down on Nail the Trick and the "back to basics" approach in an attempt to compete with EA Black Box's newly-announced competitor Skate, and came up wanting in comparison, with Skate outselling it two-to-one and winning acclaim for succeeding at almost every point where Proving Ground tried and failed. Notably, even Neversoft decided after Proving Ground that working on the games had become a chore and that it was time to hang it up, with the studio moving its effort to the Guitar Hero and Call of Duty franchises before being folded into Infinity Ward.
  • That said, even people who like the aforementioned games believe that the series well and truly lost the plot once Robomodo took over development from Neversoft. With Tony Hawk Ride in 2009 and its follow-up, Tony Hawk Shred in 2010, Robomodo attempted to revive the franchise by using a skateboard-shaped motion controller in an effort to provide an immersive skating experience, which not only failed to address any of the problems the series had been going through but also introduced several new ones. Both games failed so miserably that Activision was forced to put the Tony Hawk franchise on life support with the downloadable "back-to-basics" Pro Skater HD, a loose 2012 remake of the first two games that had mixed reception for its floaty controls, lack of content, and bugs, and the mobile Temple Run clone Shred Session, which was canceled after a soft launch in Australia and New Zealand in 2014. They attempted to revive the series in 2015 with Pro Skater 5, but its Obvious Beta state and resulting poor reception led many to believe that the franchise was done for. Fortunately, Pro Skater 1 + 2, a full remake of the first two games by Vicarious Visions in 2020, met rave reviews and marked a firm end to the Audience-Alienating Era, at least for now.
• Twisted Metal 3 and 4 were developed by 989 Studios rather than series' original developers, Singletrac. When the former staff members of Singletrac formed Incognito to develop the newer games in the franchise, it elected to wipe the events of those two titles from continuity.
• The Valis series had lain dormant since the early 1990s, until its reputation was stained in 2006 by a series of H-Games titled Valis X, which Telenet Japan published in a desperate and failed attempt to avoid bankruptcy.
• While Warhammer 40,000-based games made by Relic Entertainment (Dawn of War 1 and 2, Space Marine, etc.) have been generally well-received, the Dawn of War expansion that was farmed out to Iron Lore, Soulstorm, has received nothing but rancor. Canonically, the storyline of the previous expansion was a rousing success for the "Spess Mehreens", while the campaign of the Obvious Beta that was Soulstorm is considered an embarrassing defeat that is spoken of only with great reluctance. This is elaborated upon by fans that have noticed a few things: In Soulstorm, two factions in particular were noticeably overpowered by Iron Lore: Tau and, to a far far worse extent, Eldar. A lot of the other factions were barely complete, having only threadbare unit lineups or just plain weak units that weren't worth the resources they were made of. One of these factions hit the hardest were the In-Universe Butt-Monkey Imperial Guard. Later material that mentions the events in Soulstorm written by Games Workshop shows that the Imperial Guard won a massive victory over all other factions, the Tau were forced out of the sector entirely, and that the Eldar had lost an entire Craftworld due to the conflict. Even Dawn of War II takes multiple jabs at Soulstorm, with Blood Raven commander Indrick Boreale established as an infamous General Failure and the disastrous Kaurava campaign referred to as "a mistake" that should not be spoken of again, which seriously depleted the chapter's manpower, and ends up being part of Cyrus' reason for betrayal if he ends up as the traitor in Chaos Rising.
• The three fully 3D Worms games — Worms 3D, Worms Forts and Worms 4: Mayhem — are widely seen as the nadir of the series, with fans pretty unanimously agreeing that the series' gameplay did not translate at all well to the third dimension, and even creators Team 17 reportedly regarding the games as a failed experiment. As a result, the next couple of games went back to a similar graphical style to Worms 2 and its follow-ups, before adopting a 2.5D style that really got the series back on-track.
• For quite a few, Yandere Simulator entered one around 2017, due to several factors such as the initial hype of the game dying down, the game's production becoming noticeably more calamitous and leading to rampant Schedule Slip alongside builds solely dedicated to fixing severe glitches, increased scrutiny towards the game's developer YandereDev which escalated into semi-frequent sexual abuse allegations against both him and composer CameronF305 starting from The New '20s, and shortcomings that would later become seen as actively detrimental to both the story and gameplay, including but not limited to minor features such as minigames and easter egg modes being prioritized over major features such as rivals, excessive focus on side and even minor characters at the expense of the core cast, convoluted explanations for background details that raised more questions than answers, the flippant treatment of sensitive topics such as sexual misconduct and mental illness, and needlessly brutal difficulty (for instance, the first rival out of a planned ten has an almost invincible bodyguard protecting her at nearly all times) becoming much more prevalent.

Companies/Developers

• Infinity Ward, the studio that created Call of Duty, reached a low point for much of the 2010s after the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. In 2010, many of its staff left or were forced out by parent company Activision over payment issues, leaving the studio without many of its original creative minds, with new blood having to be brought in quickly to finish Modern Warfare 3 (and the results show, with the first third or so of the game being rather memorable, before the rest of the game simply rehashed setpieces from the previous two games).
  
  What was left of the original Infinity Ward promptly left after Modern Warfare 3, and subsequent releases from the new Infinity Ward, Ghosts and Infinite Warfare, were seen as the weakest installments in the franchise; Ghosts was disliked for its weak campaign and rehashed Modern Warfare gameplay, and Infinite Warfare was criticized for copying the sci-fi gameplay of Halo and Titanfall, on top of being overshadowed by the inclusion of Modern Warfare Remastered.
  
  During that time, the fanbase came to view studios Treyarch and Sledgehammer, respectively the former "second fiddle" to Infinity Ward and a group that had not been in any way related to the franchise before 2011, as the better developers of Call of Duty, for being at least willing to innovate and update their games. However, Infinity Ward released Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) to high praise from critics and fans for its refined gunplay and updated game engine. Also helping the game was the standalone free-to-play battle royale Warzone, which managed to increase active player base and longevity of Modern Warfare by functioning as a gateway game. Only time will tell if Infinity Ward can end their slump going into the 2020s.
• SNK's fifteen-year period as SNK Playmore (from SNK's 2001 bankruptcy to 2016) is generally not remembered well. While they still made games during this period, the only franchises that got any attention were The King of Fighters, Samurai Shodown and Metal Slug and the games that did come out were hit-or-miss, while other series only got Compilation Re-release.
  
  Around this time, SNK tried to give their series the 3D treatment to disastrous results such as Samurai Shodown: Edge of Destiny and KOF: Maximum Impact, which at least was a standalone spin-off. On top of all this, SNK Playmore mostly focused on Asia-only mobile and pachinko games to make ends meet.
  
  Things finally picked up in 2016, when their resources had finally been regathered and the company rebranded back to "SNK". They released The King of Fighters XIV and the 2019 Samurai Shodown game, which were acclaimed enough to earn a spot on the Evolution Championship Series. Around this time, SNK also licensed out its characters to appear in other games for better publicity, including Geese Howard in Tekken 7, Haohmaru in Soulcalibur VI, and Terry Bogard in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and Fighting EX Layer.
  • KOF fans don't like looking back at The King of Fighters 2001, developed by South Korean developer Eolith. It's more unpolished than the rest of the series ^note For starters, you could choose how many teammates and Strikers you wanted on a team, which enabled 1-vs-4 battles, something that should be reserved for boss fights., the quality of music took a nosedive, and many of the new characters were ignored except for a scant few like May Lee. When SNK Playmore reclaimed the wheel with 2003, they immediately ignored several story elements from 2001, including Foxy's death and the character of K9999, who was such a blatant Captain Ersatz of AKIRA's Tetsuo Shima that he could have gotten SNK sued. 2002 is a better-regarded Dream Match Game and still one of the most frequently played KOF games in tournaments, even after the release of 2002: Unlimited Match. Later on, after SNK clawed back their reputation, one of the things they did is to take K9999 and redesign him into Krohnen, basically combining the former with his dream match/non-canon Suspiciously Similar Substitute Nameless and removing the blatant references to Tetsuo Shima so that he could stand as his own character.
  • Metal Slug 4 and 5 were farmed out to South Korea's Noise Factory, and had their own issues each.
    • Metal Slug 4 reused so many assets from previous games, including bosses created by mashing up different bosses' sprites, that it was compared to a glorified ROM hack.
    • Metal Slug 5 went through a Troubled Production where SNK Playmore took over late in development, then forced Noise Factory to overhaul the game and release it with no delays, resulting in an Obvious Beta with enough removed content to make a whole new game out of.
• The Valve Corporation found themselves in a pretty dark period for much of the 2010s, which they themselves dubbed "The Wilderness". According to "The Final Hours of Half-Life: Alyx", the company found themselves in a technological rut following the release of Half-Life 2: Episode 2 (2007) as their landmark Source engine was showing its age, and attention was being funneled into its successor, Source 2. Unfortunately, this development started to gel badly with Valve's ability to create new projects, so after the releases of Portal 2 (2011), Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (2012), and Dota 2 (2013), Valve went completely radio silent in new major games and explanations thereof. While games were in fact being made, this silence was a big cause for concern among fans, not helped by their continued support of CS:GO and Dota but lack of attention for the aging Team Fortress 2.
  
  Combined with other questionable business pursuits throughout the rest of the decade (controversies surrounding quality control in Steam, their ill-fated Steam Machines, and the complete alienation resulting from Artifact), antipathy was brewing towards Valve and their stagnation, alongside a derisive attitude of how "Valve makes money, not games" (it seriously didn't help that all the games they were developing were sent straight to Development Hell, mostly due to organizational problems, victims including Left 4 Dead 3 and the infamous Half-Life 3). However, things appeared to have stabilized by the time of the Valve Index's release in 2019, paving the way for the surprise announcement of Half-Life: Alyx, which was released in 2020 to critical acclaim and commercial success, suggesting that Valve may be on its way out of the woods. In 2022, Valve finally released a successful piece of hardware in the form of the Steam Deck, a Linux-powered handheld PC that could run most Windows games via a compatibility layer called Proton, which triggered other companies to release similar devices in the following years.
• Warren Spector entered an Audience-Alienating Era with Deus Ex: Invisible War, and immediately lost his accumulated industry and fan respect. He's managed to bounce back some, which is better than most other developer/producers in the same situation have been able to do (anyone remember what John Romero has been up to since Daikatana?) but still hasn't regained his former stature. Because of lingering rancor, Thief: Deadly Shadows received less fair critical reviews than it deserved, and Spector hasn't been invited to return for a sequel. He may have found a rehabilitation of his image in the unlikely vessel of a Mickey Mouse game, though its mixed reception (and Spector's claims that negative reviewers "misunderstood" the game) didn't make for the reputation resurrection that was hoped for.
• Microsoft's gaming efforts on both the Xbox and PC were said to have gone downhill during the late 2000s and early 2010s.
  • The Xbox 360 had a fantastic first few years (Red Ring of Death notwithstanding), and quickly became the console of choice for many hardcore gamers thanks to its innovations in not only graphics but also console features and online services, as well as a series of blockbuster games.
    
    A few years into the 360's lifespan, however, Microsoft's Xbox division saw a turnover of executives which led to a change of strategy. This new leadership, led by Don Mattrick (formerly of EA), shifted the company's focus away from delivering high quality exclusive games and into attempting to win over the casual users brought into the game console market by the Wii. While this approach led to some interesting developments, such as bringing Netflix streaming to consoles, it also produced a lot of ideas that simply weren't very well thought out or useful, such as some questionably necessary alterations to the console's interface at the expense of the core game library. Microsoft also released Kinect in 2010 as their answer to the Wii's motion controls, and while the device was a hit initially, sales and interest in it eventually petered out (also much like the Wii) as both users and developers quickly discovered its limitations, and Microsoft's focus on it well past that point alienated the hardcore gamers that it had attracted so well in the console's early years. While Microsoft was doing all this, the PlayStation 3 (whose early years had been an Audience Alienating Era for Sony documented elsewhere on this page) took the opportunity to rebuild its reputation and outpace the 360 when it came to exclusive game releases and, eventually, sales.
    
    All of this culminated in the disastrous reveal of the 360's successor, the Xbox One, in 2013. Almost immediately, the Xbox One triggered a major backlash due to its overly restrictive DRM and online connection requirements, perceived focus on TV services over games, and its inclusion of Kinect with all consoles, the last of which made its launch price $100 more than the PlayStation 4 despite the Xbox having weaker hardware. The console's disastrous reveal and launch was a wake up call for Microsoft; after E3 2013, they removed the controversial always online and DRM features, fired Don Mattrick and replaced him with fan-favorite Phil Spencer, and spent much of the One's lifespan trying to rebuild the image of Xbox, through measures such as releasing a cheaper Kinect-less version of the console in just six months, consumer-friendly features like backwards compatibility, support for cross-platform online play, and the Xbox Game Pass, a subscription service offering complimentary access to a variety of games, essentially a "Netflix for Games", and a massive spending spree on development studios to answer the criticism that they lack interesting exclusive games. It is generally agreed that Xbox was firmly out of its troubled years by 2021, with the Xbox Series X|S selling well, a string of well-received games being released among a wide range of genres (including Psychonauts 2, Forza Horizon 5, Age of Empires IV and Halo Infinite), and Game Pass becoming one of the best value propositions in the industry. It's telling that the main response to Xbox's risky attempt to purchase the troubled Activision Blizzard was one of cautious optimism, showing just how well Phil Spencer had managed to rehabilitate the brand's image among players.
  • On the PC side of things, Microsoft’s gaming output became increasingly focused on its consoles during the mid to late Turn of the Millennium, to the point where they were hardly publishing any PC games at all by the start of the next decade. This was in spite of the company producing Microsoft Windows and DirectX, the operating system and API that the overwhelming majority of PC games run on. A big factor in this was the failure of Games for Windows Live (GFWL), Microsoft’s attempt at introducing a centralized gaming service for PC à la Xbox Live, which gamers widely panned as intrusive DRM that made playing multiplayer games a chore at best and actively interfered with playing games at worst. Meanwhile, Valve stepped in as the center point of PC gaming, with Steam offering the same kind of service that Microsoft promised with GFWL, while being much more user-friendly.
    
    However, Microsoft began to turn things around by the middle of The New '10s, around the same time they saved the Xbox brand. This began with the introduction of the "Play Anywhere" initiative, which not only meant that all future Microsoft-published games would come to PC, but that users could obtain both Xbox and PC versions with a single purchase. And, for those who didn’t want to buy them through the Windows Store, said games were also made available through Steam, though without the aforementioned cross-buy bonus. In 2019, Microsoft announced that they were bringing both their hit "Game Pass" subscription service and Halo: The Master Chief Collection to PC, finally bringing its flagship FPS franchise to the platform after a 12 year absence following the maligned Halo 2 port.
    
    2020 was regarded as a major turning point for Microsoft’s PC efforts, as it saw the release of two major PC-focused titles from the company, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, a game which pulled no punches in its hardware requirements, and Gears Tactics, a strategy game, a historically PC-centric genre due to the difficulties in implementing it with a controller. In a turnaround from the "Xbox-first" attitude of prior years, both titles launched exclusively for PC, with console versions releasing later. With all of these efforts, it's safe to say that many PC gamers see Microsoft in a much better light than they did a few years prior.
• In the 90s, Sega was known for being the only company able to compete with Nintendo, thanks to the success of the Sega Genesis. Unfortunately, this was short lived, as what followed would be a series of blunders that is generally agreed to have started with the 32X, a 32-bit add-on for the Genesis, that left consumers confused, and killed their trust in the company. Not helping things was Sega of America's attempt to compete with the PlayStation by releasing their next console, the Sega Saturn several months early without warning. This hurt Sega's relationship with retailers, third party developers, and the press, and alongside the poor response to the 32X and far greater interest in the PlayStation, resulted in the Saturn being a commercial failure on all fronts.^note Except in Japan, where the Saturn saw much greater success, actively competed with the PlayStation, and actually manage to beat the Nintendo 64 in lifetime sales. Sega attempted to Win Back the Crowd with their next console, the Dreamcast, but while sales were promising at launch, the damage was already done, and the impending launch of the PlayStation 2 took all attention away from Sega, putting them at risk of bankruptcy. This forced Sega to retire as a console manufacturer, and start developing games for other consoles, most of which while well recieved, failed to capture an audience and sold below expectations in spite of being on more popular hardware. Sega would continue to struggle financially until 2004, when they merged with Sammy Corporation.
  • While things were looking up for Sega financially following the Sammy merger, the company would go through another Audience-Alienating Era following it. Sega took a major shift to how games were released at this time, where any IP that failed to make a profit would be shelved, and the ones that actually did sell tended to be Christmas Rushed. As a result, in the seventh generation, Sega didn't have a lot of variety with their games, and what was released were generally considered to be somewhat polarizing at best, or downright awful at worst. Not helping matters is that several of Sega's games around this time were only released in Japan much to the dismay of international fans. Sega clearly realized this strategy wasn't working, and around 2010, things gradually started to get better.
• The PlayStation 3 launch era was not a good time for Sony, mostly thanks to how they handled the console's launch:
  • Having been the king of the video gaming scene for two generations with the PS1 and PS2, they became overconfident, believing that their brand name would be enough to make people flock with the highly advanced and expensive PS3. This turned out to be a great folly for these reasons:
    • The console had a lackluster launch library and a lack of Killer Apps immediately on launch.
    • The high price tag was a big turn-off. This is mostly because Sony put up a lot of highly advanced technologies for its time, most of them not having a lot to do with games, and the console hit the market right before the 2007-2009 recession, which left a lot of potential customers in a situation where they didn't have the financial security to buy such expensive consoles.
  • Sony's way of promoting the console also do not sit well with their fans either. Similar to Sega's attempt to advertise the Sega Saturn in the West, Sony promoted the PS3 with very weird ads, which included a baby doll salivating over it. This confused and frightened their fans instead of truly winning them over.
  • Ultimately, the emergence of the Nintendo Wii and its rising popularity finally showed Sony just how bad they were handling the situation, as they ended up dead last in that generation's console war (even being beaten by the Xbox 360). This was their final humble pie that prompted them to finally start to fix what went wrong with the PS3, rolling out the PlayStation 3 Slim as the way to test what should be fixed. They finally managed to end their Audience-Alienating Era when they applied the lessons learned from the Slim to the PlayStation 4.
• The 2010s are generally considered a dark age for Konami for these reasons:
  • Early in the decade, their record of game releases had been rather spotty with the poor reception of Bomberman Act:Zero and the divisive Castlevania: Lords of Shadow subseries amongst others. Due to these failings, they made the decision to downsize their video game department and instead focus on smaller ventures like either mobile gaming or pachinko.
  • Unfortunately, this clashed very hard with the loyal console fans, especially Metal Gear and Silent Hill fans, culminating in various missteps such as cancelling the highly anticipated Silent Hills prototype (referred as P.T.), feuding with Hideo Kojima until he resigned, and topped with a damning interview that portrayed them as an extremely abusive employer to their video game developers. They became one of the most hated companies in the era, and as a final nail in the coffin, they released Metal Gear Survive, widely considered to be a Franchise Killer of the esteemed Metal Gear franchise.
  • After the venture to pachinko did not turn out as well as they expected, Konami tried to go back into video game development by outsourcing to smaller companies. Their first attempt at a new big game, Contra: Rogue Corps, turned out to be a complete bomb which further convinced the fandom that they'd really lost their edge.
  • For these reasons, Konami ended up limiting themselves to mostly Japanese-based games and franchises, where they were not that heavily ridiculed and managed to maintain smaller scale successes by creating or helping the developers of indie games, mostly depending on the Yu-Gi-Oh! franchise as their stable moneymaker.
  • It wasn't until the 2020s that they eventually started getting more serious in trying to get out of their rut: Aside of two new ongoing Bomberman games (listed above), they remastered the games at their golden age (around The '90s) for modern players, announced multiple new Silent Hill games, giving Metal Gear players not only the remasters of the Solid Snake and Big Boss trilogies, but also a HD remake of the first chronological game of the series (and the most hailed one), a remaster of their JRPG series, and even a return to form for Contra (Operation Galuga) after their failure with Rogue Corps. While they will still have a hard time living down the dark age, many of those who stuck with Konami in the hard times are glad with this effort to get back to the game.
  • About the only Konami video game franchises that managed to remain relatively unaffected were their arcade games, and that's because they're handled by the same division that handles parlor games (including the aforementioned pachinko machines). Even then, this part of Konami didn't go without ill effect: the BEMANI franchise was hit with the "BEMANI Sound Team" controversy, in which in-house musicians and other artists had their published output anonymized and started making fewer public appearances, with those few appearances having their likenesses censored out in public streams. But beyond that, BEMANI fans generally didn't notice anything seriously amiss, as games in this series continued to follow their usual schedules of updates and new releases.
• The late 2000s to mid-2010s turned out to be one for Capcom, on multiple fronts:
  • During these years, due to the rising trend of Darker and Edgier reboots, Capcom decided to cash into this phenomenon using some of their existing franchises. They slipped up badly at least twice: Bionic Commando (2009) and especially DmC: Devil May Cry. The latter was much more pronounced due to Devil May Cry being a bigger and more mainstream sensation, yet the radical shift in Dante's personality rubbed the fans in the wrong way and the game's director giving a negative response to legitimate criticism on his design, insulting the players at the same time, all giving fans reason to believe that Capcom had lost it. On this front, the era ended after Capcom decided to Un-Reboot the franchise with Devil May Cry 5, which turned out to be a resounding success that restored the fanbase's faith.
  • In this era, Capcom's flagship Survival Horror series Resident Evil aso began to fumble thanks to the increased prevalence of action elements; while this had been the case as far back as the widely acclaimed Resident Evil 2, and was a key element in Resident Evil 4 revitalizing the series in 2005, fans of "pure" survival horror were not amused, and even the RE fans who tolerated the focus on action were beginning to think it was becoming far too overblown and campy, something that reached its nadir with the commercially successful but very divisive Resident Evil 6. Thankfully, this front's era ended after Capcom released Resident Evil 7, which brought the series back to its Survival Horror roots. Capcom has not looked back with future Resident Evil installments, with the 2019 remake of RE2 even fusing the survival horror elements with the over-the-shoulder, third person camera introduced in RE4.
  • Keiji Inafune, at that time considered the father of the Mega Man series, would end up leaving the company, causing the widely anticipated Mega Man Legends 3 to be cancelled and Capcom to leave this particular flagship franchise in a drought, perceived by many to be their retaliation aagainst Inafune. This embittered many Mega Man fans who believed their beloved franchise was done dirty, not helped by some liberal portrayals that did not mesh well with them, such as "Bad Box Art Mega Man" in Street Fighter X Tekken.^*Which was actually a case of bad timing. Inafune himself approved the use of the character in SFxT, and had not Legends 3 and several other projects been canned, his inclusion would've likely been seen as the Affectionate Parody it was intended to be. This particular front's era ended, ironically enough, thanks to Inafune himself, whose indie game campaign for Mighty No. 9 — a clear Spiritual Successor to Mega Man — ultimately fumbled. This led to Capcom creating a true sequel for their Blue Bomber after eight long years: Mega Man 11. MM11 was met with applause and assured the fans that their franchise wasn't dead yet as a whole. Ironically, many retrospectives would later suggest that Inafune himself was a major driving force behind the company's slump, being credited with quite a few of the above flops as part of a misguided push to appeal to Westerners.
  • This era was also the time Capcom began experimenting with the more questionable parts of microtransactions. The two chief offenders were the ending of Asura's Wrath being locked behind DLC and the implementation of on-disc DLC and pay-to-win elements in Street Fighter X Tekken. As such, the planned Tekken X Street Fighter ended up being canned. Capcom's practice in this has been sporadic ever since, so it's not quite clear if this particular aspect of their dark age has actually ended.
  • While their Fighting Game front looked okay in that time frame (despite the hiccup of Street Fighter X Tekken, Capcom was still going strong with Street Fighter IV), it entered its own Audience-Alienating Era shortly after, with the abysmal reception to the release of Street Fighter V. Although Capcom tuned up the game for good over time, the first impression of SFV was so underwhelming that it damaged their prestige. Adding fuel to the fire were the controversial decisions surrounding Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite, which overshadowed its otherwise decent gameplay mechanics. Capcom has at least made efforts to exit this era, by maximizing the first impression of Street Fighter 6, and the end result ultimately paid off: Not only is it viewed as a solid entry in the Street Fighter series, it proved that Capcom could still make a good fighting game.
• In addition to some of the Audience-Alienating Eras their individual series went through as detailed above under The Sims and SimCity, Maxis as a whole went through a particularly rough time after the release of their monstrously-successful SimCity 2000 from about 1994 to 1998. The only thing seemingly keeping them afloat was the heavy amount of ports and re-releases of said game, while any new product they worked on seemed like a desperate attempt to throw absolutely anything to the Sim-prefix wall and see what stuck. While some were met with at least some positive reception like SimLife and SimFarm, nothing caught on particularly well and at worst they were outright commercial failures and laughing stock for game magazines like SimCopter and Streets of SimCity. The desperation got to a point where some of the games they released under the Sim label were outright In Name Only such as SimTunes, a music-making tool that wasn't a simulation of any sort. Ultimately, the folks running the company were feeling the pains of this lack of direction and started seeking any potential acquisitions, ultimately being acquired by Electronic Arts and finally setting them back on course when they began work on the true successor to SimCity 2000, and their name would finally become a force to be reckoned with again when The Sims became their new monster franchise.
• Blizzard Entertainment entered a low point since 2018 on multiple fronts:
  • 2018 was when it all went downhill for Blizzard. That year's BlizzCon convention was overshadowed by the negative audience reception to the mobile-exclusive Diablo Immortal. What was supposed to be a climactic announcement of a new mainline Diablo game turned out to be a mobile spin-off, which infuriated fans who spent upwards of $200 in hopes of witnessing a mainline title announcement. It didn't help that developer Wyatt Cheng impulsively and insensitively asked "Do you guys not have phones?", which quickly became an internet meme. One month later, Heroes of the Storm saw its e-sports side abruptly shuttered with participating professional gamers not receiving prior notification or compensation.
  • While 2019 started out on a sour note with mass layoffs, the real controversy came when Blizzard became the center of international "Blitzchung" scandal. During a Hearthstone tournament, Blizzard punished e-sports player Ng "Blitzchung" Wai Chung by suspending him for a year and taking away his winnings after he voiced support for the 2019 Hong Kong protests during an interview. Blizzard's response spurred furious protests from not only Blizzard's audience, but also from fans of other video games, Blizzard's own employees, the general public and politicians, all accusing the company of engaging in censorship to appease the Chinese government and Blizzard's Chinese investors so their games wouldn't be banned.^note While some believed "Blitzchung" should be punished for making a political speech during a non-political interview (which is against Blizzard's rules), even they thought his punishment was disproportionately harsh and more about appeasing Chinese censors, especially since several professional Overwatch players received lighter punishments for racism and sexism. Blizzard also terminated their contract with the two livestream presenters present even though they didn't violate actual rules and were also caught off guard by "Blitzchung"'s statements given how they ducked during his statement and even cut the feed. The controversy was so severe that it not only prompted a boycott by professional Hearthstone players, but also overshadowed the release of the otherwise positively received World of Warcraft: Classic.
  • 2020 didn't improve for Blizzard. Warcraft III: Reforged became one of the worst video game remakes as it not only failed to match trailer footage but also ended up deleting fan mods of the original title. However, the biggest casualty of that year was Blizzard's signature Hero Shooter Overwatch. The COVID-19 Pandemic scuttled Overwatch League tournaments as social distancing orders made in-person stadium events impossible. Furthermore, Overwatch experienced a declining playerbase and revenue stream due to a lack of updates and because of competition from newer Hero Shooters, most notably Apex Legends and Valorant.
  • However, 2021 proved to be the nadir of Blizzard controversies. A series of lawsuits and investigative reports revealed that Blizzard had a decades-long misogynistic work culture where female employees experienced regular misogyny that included both financial discrimination and sexual harassment. The harassment was so extreme that one woman committed suicide while on a company trip with an abusive co-worker. Even worse was that the company's leadership was aware of harassment yet chose to either downplay incidents, defend harassers or even retaliate against victims. The scandal lead to Blizzard employees staging strikes, sponsors pulling out from Blizzard's eSports tournaments and both the state of California and federal government investigating Blizzard for workplace violations. Given Blizzard's inclusive image and sterling reputation, as noted by the common quote "Blizzard can do no wrong", the company experienced a greater fall from grace than most. The scandal also caused parent company Activision Blizzard's stock to plummet low enough for Microsoft to announce a corporate buyout of Activision Blizzard.
  • 2022 to 2023 marked the final years of Blizzard as an independent titan of gaming. 2022 saw the release Overwatch 2, which while having much initial fanfare at launch as a free-to-play game, soon struggled to maintain fan goodwill and mainstream relevance due to its controversial monetization and how its much touted PvE was released long after launch in a watered down state. 2023 was a mixed year as while Diablo IV became the best selling game in Blizzard history with $666 million within the first five days of release, the year also saw Blizzard permanently end the Overwatch League and Microsoft completing its buyout of the company.

Other

• This can befall a franchise when moving to a new games system on their first next gen iteration while developers come to grips with the new technology. Sports games in in particular can struggle with this, due to their annual release cycles giving the developers little time to adapt to new technology. Specific examples include:
  • Madden NFL, with Electronic Arts themselves admitting that bringing the series to seventh gen was a struggle and certain issues and restructuring of features was due to the core game mechanics not translating over well.
  • NBA Live 96 was essentially just a graphic improvement over the 16 bit era, with the PC being a more Polished Port. Later games would include better graphics, gameplay and features.
  • WWE Video Games would generally have most all of the features on their first next gen game gone (this would carry over to Create-A-Wrestler mode being gutted in their off shoot Raw or Day or Reckoning games, most moves being removed, three match season mode, extremely long loading times, etc.) while the next year there would be more options, features, moves and wrestlers, with the game being far more polished.
  • F1 2015 was this for Codemasters' Formula One games, as it excised the previous entries' career mode (only having a simple championship mode) and several in-game features due to focusing development on moving to a new game engine designed for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. These were largely brought back and expanded upon in 2016's entry.
• The Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3):
  • The event was widely believed to have gone through an audience-alienating era between 2007 and 2008. Once a Mecca for gamers, the event was made invitation-only and attendance dropped from 60,000 down to a low of 5,000 (the event was also inexplicably renamed the "E3 Media & Business Summit" during that time with little justification other than "the video game industry is not about 'entertainment', it's about business"). As a result, E3 went from being the ultimate expo in the video games to a low-key event. It didn't help that the E for All trade show meant to replace it turned out to be a dud. Also to make things worse the announcements and game demos E3 is known for were rather lacking in comparison to previous years.
  • Many have seen E3 as having gone through another beginning in the mid-to-late 2010s. Although the E3 press conferences were live streamed, with the proliferation of the Internet and social media enabling companies to drop announcements and trailers at any time via own events like Nintendo Direct and Sony’s State of Play, many started to question the need for an in-person, annual, industry-wide conference like E3. This resulted in both declining viewership and company participation, culminating in Sony skipping E3 2019 entirely. The conference's reputation suffered an additional blow that year when the discovery of an unencrypted spreadsheet file on the ESA's website revealed the personal information of all of the prior conference's attendees, comprising thousands of game journalists and industry professionals. While E3 2020 was understandably cancelled due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, the original idea of shifting towards being a primarily Internet influencer-based event was decried as pandering, and coupled with the departure of longtime host Geoff Keighley (who turned to focus on the Game Awards, which quickly became a strong alternative to E3 as a place for major game industry announcements^note although not in the same number, as the event's main focus are the awards, not game announcements), many assumed that dark times are ahead for E3, if the event has a future at all. These predictions would be seemingly confirmed when both E3 2022 and E3 2023 were cancelled mere months before they were set to be held (E3 2023 in particular was cancelled due to almost every major game company announcing that they wouldn't be attending), with no indication that anyone is planning to hold the event ever again. Eventually, in December of 2023, the ESA would announce that E3 was dead for good.
  • 2021's showing has been agreed upon by many to be one of the worst E3 editions of all time, if not the worst. While the conference wasn't cancelled outright like the previous year, the still-ongoing pandemic turned the event into a series of loosely-connected live-streamed presentations. Beyond a few exceptions (the joint Xbox and Bethesda Showcase, the Nintendo Direct and the Ubisoft presentation are all agreed to be at minimum solid) the most common complaint is that the presentations barely showed any new games coming out, and just showed games that were already known at the point. And most of the new games shown being just cinematic trailers for games coming out next year or two (and in the case of Take Two Interactive, no game was shown at all, opting instead to present a live forum on social themes).
  • Even the few companies that still put on a good showing at E3 tend to have an asterisk next to their participation. Nintendo began showing a fairly-regular Nintendo Direct in their E3 slot, which while generally well-liked isn't treated as a special edition of the show in comparison to any other Direct elsewhere in the year. Meanwhile, Xbox has been noted to still treat their E3 presentations as their big yearly announcement show, but mainly because everybody else vacating that spot has let Xbox have much of the week to themselves.
• There was a time where, to save on bandwidth costs, the site for hosting custom content for Garry's Mod forced its users to download add-ons via torrents rather than getting them directly off the site. It lasted for about two months.
• Mobile game advertising is widely considered to be in one as of 2018. The biggest blaming factor is the Dublin-based game developer Playrix, who utilises No Budget, Too Incompetent to Operate a Blanket, and Very False Advertising in order to promote games such as Gardenscapes, leading to other companies also employing rampant false advertising to sell their products.

Specific Genres

• The Eastern RPG (or JRPG, if you want to be specific) genre went through one from about 2007 until 2012, a time period corresponding to The Seventh Generation of Console Video Games. The Western RPG was taking off like a rocket, thanks the efforts of developers like BioWare and Bethesda Softworks, offering up fresh new stories and gameplay mechanics along with unparalleled production values. The JRPG genre, meanwhile, was largely put on the backburner at this time. For one thing, budgets were substantially reduced, thanks to Western game development largely overtaking Japanese game development in the mid-2000s. While there were a few noteworthy games released, most JRPGs at the time were criticized for having recycled plots and being too reliant on well-worn tropes like "small town boy finds himself wrapped up in a massive underground resistance movement against an evil dictator." To make matters worse, smaller companies were constantly localizing Japanese niche titles that would have little chance of appeal in the states, resulting in numerous examples of critic-audience divide (critics panned the games, while dedicated fans defended them). The fact that many popular JRPGs in this era came out on handheld systems such as the Nintendo DS and Playstation Portable further contributed to the genre's decline in the West, since audiences there had largely been introduced to the genre via graphically impressive console games like Final Fantasy VII, and saw handheld gaming as the domain of shorter, simpler and/or more casual games instead of lengthy RPGs.
  
  Fortunately, the genre rekindled much of its spark in early 2012, when the critically acclaimed and commercially successful Xenoblade Chronicles 1 was finally released in the West on (of all consoles) the Wii, breathing some much needed new life into the then-stagnant genre. Later that year, the almost-as-well-received The Last Story was localized on the same console. Since then, a stream of critically and commercially successful JRPGs (and Western-developed JRPG-like games) had been released, such as Undertale and Bravely Default. Fire Emblem rose in popularity after the release of Fire Emblem: Awakening on the 3DS, with Fates and Three Houses achieving similar critical and commercial success. The before mentioned Nintendo Hard Souls series, spearheaded by the insane success of Dark Souls would create such a popular and beloved franchise, it spawned its own sub-genre (the Souls-like RPGs), and go on to sell thirty million copies, to much critical and fan acclaim. The Monster Hunter games proved to be killer apps for the 3DS before achieving mainstream popularity in early 2018 with Monster Hunter: World. Persona 5 stole the hearts of critics and players alike and helped push the franchise from niche to borderline mainstream given how its protagonist ended up in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Long-awaited Square Enix titles like Final Fantasy XV and Kingdom Hearts III were finally released (in late 2016 and early 2019 respectively) to much fanfare and generally positive reviews. And Trials of Mana at long last received a high-definition remake and English localization, while the original game, Final Fantasy Adventure, and Secret of Mana were successfully re-released on the Nintendo Switch. Dragon Quest XI came out and saw unprecedented international success^note Despite its massive popularity in its home country, the series has mostly been niche elsewhere; much like Persona 5 it was helped along when its protagonist appeared as a playable character in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. The Eastern RPG genre is now alive and well, happily coexisting with the Western RPG genre.
• Traditional 2D fighting games fell into this starting after the end of 2001 and lasting until the end of the decade. Once dominant across the 1990s, the rampant Capcom Sequel Stagnation, coupled with the rise of 3D fighting games like Tekken, Soulcalibur, Dead or Alive and Virtua Fighter and the high-profile commercial failure of Street Fighter III, led to a sudden death of the genre after the end of 2001. Street Fighter would not receive a new mainline entry until 2008; Mortal Kombat fell into obscurity as it tried chasing the 3D games trend to compete with the aforementioned Tekken, Soulcalibur, Virtua Fighter and Dead or Alive and did not succeed (which resulted in an Audience-Alienating Era of its own as explained above); SNK went defunct and was brought out by another company, with their flagship The King of Fighters only receiving new installments to prevent it from being abandoned; and new 2D fighting games like Guilty Gear and Melty Blood were too niche and often derided as being unworthy of holding the torch that games like Street Fighter and The King of Fighters held^note There's a term for this: kusoge (meaning "shitty game"), a game that's viewd by the competitive fighting game community in a So Bad, It's Good manner that nobody takes serious at best, and in a Bile Fascination manner at worst, very frequently the latter.
  
  Thankfully, the genre rekindled much of its spark by the end of the 2000s, with the releases of Street Fighter IV and BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger in 2008 bringing new life to a genre that had become moribund. Mortal Kombat went back to its roots with Mortal Kombat (2011), going on to become the most successful title to date and spawning two more sequels and a Spiritual Successor series called Injustice; The King of Fighters would regain footing in The New '10s with the console^*2011 and PC^*2013 releases of KOF XIII, followed by an even bigger boost in 2016 with XIV (to the point that SNK reported their 2016-2017 fiscal year to be a very profitable one); Guilty Gear would see a revival in 2014 with the Xrd installments and then go on to receive a highly successful release in 2021 with -STRIVE-; and Melty Blood co-creator French Bread would create a Spiritual Successor (and Cult Classic in its own right) known as Under Night In-Birth in 2012 before returning to Melty Blood in 2021 with Type Lumina, which proved notable enough to cement the series a spot at EVO for the first time since Actress Again's inclusion in 2010.
• The Real-Time Strategy genre fell into one in the 2010s as their relatively niche fanbases made RTS games less appealing to publishers seeking to develop games in more popular genres. What is somewhat odd about this trend is that the late 2000s were a pretty good time for RTS games all things considered: Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars and Red Alert 3 both filled that classic RTS itch, Sins of a Solar Empire won wide acclaim for expanding RTS gameplay to a massive scale, and the likes of World in Conflict took the genre in a more progressive and innovative direction. Even games that were less successful, like EndWar, still clearly come from a place of experimentation and risk-taking. But come around 2010, and the RTS genre abruptly fell off a cliff. Many blame the poorly-received Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight for being a Dolled-Up Instalment that ended the Tiberium games on a sour note, but even without it the number of RTS games in active development simply dried up. The few major exceptions to the genre's decline can be counted on one hand: StarCraft II^note which became a competitive darling like its predecessor, but even then Activision Blizzard's accelerating profit-chasing eventually slowed support for the game to a crawl beyond continued balance updates, with the Nova Covert Ops mission pack that was intended to continue the game's single-player content beyond the campaign trilogy failing to get a successor, while Warcraft III: Reforged became an infamous failure thanks to a publisher being unwilling to commit suitable resources to the project on the basis that it wouldn't turn a profit, Total War^note which combines RTS tactical gameplay with a turn-based strategic map, with its regular releases becoming a PC gaming staple, Company of Heroes^note Company of Heroes 2 was released in 2013 to a mixed initial reception, but it remained well-supported through the decade and maintained a strong cult following, enough for a third game to be greenlit for 2022. Relic Entertainment's other big RTS release in this decade, Dawn of War III, was an unfortunate flop widely viewed as the result of an awkward attempt to fuse Multiplayer Online Battle Arena gameplay with a traditional RTS, and Age of Empires^note which experienced a revival thanks to a very well-received HD Edition of Age of Empires II, which was so successful that it received its own Expansion Packs and led to the development of thorough and well-supported Definitive Edition versions of both II and III, with a full new game being developed alongside them. Beyond them, the RTS genre largely remains a realm of small indie projects and communities forming around appreciating and supporting classic games.
• Racing Games fell into this in the 2010s, at least for those who aren't simulation racing enthusiasts. As this video by Raycevick explores, an emphasis on producing the most realistic driving simulations, often within a very narrow band of "realism", took over the genre as developers poured resources into things that only the most dedicated players who invested in expensive racing wheels and cockpits would notice. This often came at the expense of providing a fun, user-friendly, aesthetically pleasing gameplay experience for people (especially newcomers to the genre) playing with only a controller or a mouse and keyboard, who would not notice these details and instead find the games obtuse, clunky, inaccessible, and riddled with bugs that would shatter the illusion of realism. What's more, this dedication to hyperrealism meant that not only did every game look and play the same, often with the exact same cars and tracks, but they did so by design. Meanwhile, "arcade" racing games less focused on realism began to die out, with Need for Speed (which itself became contentious in the 2010s), the "simcade" Forza Horizon, and mobile games like Asphalt being the only successful games still carrying its torch by the 2020s.

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