X Killer Cleanup

...Yet.

Yeah, I don't like to be speculative but I don't think E3 is coming back, ever.

Still, I would advise against adding the example until E3 is definitively gone.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Jun 26th 2023 at 10:27:45 AM

I have a question about this newly-added example from CreatorKiller.Video Games:

• Daedalic Entertainment shut down their internal game studio and laid off their development staff a little over the month after the launch of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, which launched in a very buggy state and quickly became one of the worst-reviewed games of 2023. They would continue to be a publisher, however, so they weren't completely killed off by Gollum's failure.

If they still exist, just not making games in-house anymore, does it count?

Also, on CreatorKiller.Music, someone changed every instance of "committed suicide" to "died by suicide", which doesn't sound right to me. Should it be changed back?

It seems the wording is part of a wider effort to reflect what suicide really is. "commit suicide" makes it sound like it's a crime, or otherwise intentional, but most situations that lead toward suicide hardly are.

I believe "died by suicide" is the preferred terminology these days.

This was added to Genre-Killer:

• The once quite lucrative wresting "shoot interview" DVD market was killed off by the trend of basically every notable retired wrestler starting their own podcast in the late 2010s, along with the sharp decline in the sales of physical media in general. Sean Oliver, who produced and hosted many of those interviews for his company Kayfabe Commentaries, finally threw in the towel and began hosting the Kliq This podcast with Kevin Nash in 2022, though the archived interviews are still available on the Kayfabe Commentaries website, and some are on YouTube.

This sounds more like a Trend Killer example to me as written. Keep, move, or remove?

Agree it's more Trend Killer, being about a media channel rather than a genre. Also there's a typo in "wresting".

For the Sakura Wars entries:

• The Sakura Wars series has had this happen twice:
  • Sales for the series started to decline with Sakura Wars 3: Is Paris Burning?, but RED Entertainment soldiered on. The first true bomb of the series was Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love. The game was an Acclaimed Flop, it did well with critics both in the east and west but bombed in sales in all regions. In Japan it only cleared 144,668 units in Japan, and in America it launched in the same month as Final Fantasy XIII. Sega became the sole owner of the franchise, and canceled the Sakura Wars World Project and any other projects that were in development.
  • The second, tragic (modern) death of the Sakura Wars franchise can likely be blamed on Sakura Revolution, a mobile game made and released to capitalize on the success of Sakura Wars (2019). Due to said console game's modest success, SEGA poured an insane amount of funding into Revolution (estimated to be roughly ~USD $30 million) expecting it to take off, only for it to bomb horrifically and implode within only seven months of release. SEGA has not said a peep about Sakura Wars ever since.

Do these examples fit?

The second one ignores the five-year waiting period.

As for the first one: according to Wikipedia, there was a spin-off game released three years later, and then an 11-year gap until the next entry (and that one was a Soft Reboot), so maybe the spin-off qualifies.

Late, but I moved the example. Thanks all.

Trivia.Thomas And The Magic Railroad

• Franchise Killer: Although it didn't kill Thomas & Friends, which continues to this day, it did kill off Shining Time Station, the spin-off that brought Thomas to America in the first place. While the show had already ended for quite some time before the film, the film's poor critical and financial reception would ultimately and permanently shut down the station for good, with no new projects featuring the setting having been made since the film and the original show itself becoming swept aside and ignored.

So apparently this movie killed a show that was already dead?

Not only that, but the show stopped having reruns a few years before the movie came out, and I didn't see anything saying the show was ever planned to return.

Needless to say, that example can be cut.

So E3 admitted they're done for good. I'm pretty sure that for something for a work or franchise to apply for the X Killer tropes, the creator has to admit that the work wasn't successful and it basically ended the project or their career for good, right?

Edited by Siegfried1337 on Dec 12th 2023 at 2:46:58 AM

E3 wouldn't qualify for this. It ended because of circumstances outside its control, not because of the 2019 leak incident.

After the E3 Leak and disastrous 2021 presentation, you call that "factors outside of their control"?

I suppose it could be a case of End of an Age.

Really, they should've learnt from those years, but that's for another forum thread.

Edited by Diamondeye218 on Dec 15th 2023 at 11:20:34 AM

The 2019 leak was bad, but COVID seems more likely as the bigger factor here. It's hard to pinpoint one moment where E3 was "killed" as it seemed to be a culmination of many problems the show had been facing for years. Arguably the canary in the coalmine was as early as 2012, when Nintendo gave up expensive E3 press conferences in favor of Nintendo Direct presentation, which every other game company has adopted a version of since and made E3 increasingly obsolete over time.

I'm going to need a timeline for this. I know that E3 would definitely qualify for that trope, but compiling the multitude of reasons for it is another thing.

Does it even qualify if there's a multitude of reasons for E3's decline, and thus no real "Killer" moment for them?

On several pages related to Madonna, American Life is often cited as a Creator Killer: see CreatorKiller/Music and Trivia/AmericanLife. I want to ask if that can actually apply, given that her very next album just two years later, Confessions on a Dance Floor, was a massive hit, something that those cited entries both acknowledge.

I would say no. It seems that that album was just a slump that she recovered from.

I have to wonder if those entries were added after Todd in the Shadows covered American Life on Trainwreckords; he himself noted that a album covered on that subseries doesn't indicate the definitive end of a career as much of a turning point in it (he's also made note of artists, like Cher, who have come back again and again after having albums bomb on them).

I found this entry on the Trivia.El Hazard The Magnificent World page:

• Franchise Killer: The poor reception of The Alternative World halved the show from 26 to 13 episodes and buried the El-Hazard series for good. Another attempt to revive the franchise in a new series called The Dual World started up in 2018 but was ultimately not successful, having only raised 16% of the intended goal.

Any thoughts?

Edited by gjjones on Jan 16th 2024 at 4:29:05 AM

Here's a somewhat non-relevant example from Trivia.Shrek 1:

• Creator Killer: Not to DreamWorks itself, but one of the franchise's sources of fuel was all the snark directed towards Disney boss and Jeffrey Katzenberg's former superior Michael Eisner, including having Farquaad be a caricature of him; this movie was one of the multiple punches that eventually knocked Eisner out of the Mouse House in 2005 (nearly losing Pixar was the final punch to send him to the floor).

Seems like a stretch.