10 Exact Moments That Killed Video Game Franchises

3. That First Trailer - Call Of Duty

Another one for the "died and came back" pile, Call of Duty went through one hell of an experimental phase across the 2010s.

Without anyone asking for it, and feeling more like a pre-emptive response to Titanfall becoming the next big name in first-person shooters, once that franchise failed to catch on, COD was left chasing an artistic direction nobody wanted, falling apart completely with 2016's Infinite Warfare.

Coming after the badly received Black Ops 3 - itself a game about mind-melding super soldiers and sequences that played themselves if you let go of the controller - Infinite Warfare's trailer instantly became the most downvoted video in Youtube history.

Although I'll personally stick up for Infinite Warfare being an almost Star Wars-esque romp through the cosmos with some well-delivered stakes and a fun crew of characters, this just wasn't Call of Duty, whatsoever.

Fans were screaming for a return to normality for the franchise the only way they knew how, and that dislike bar morphed into a forgettable return to World War II, before Black Ops 4 went multiplayer-only to avoid more storytelling qualms, and COD finally stood tall once again, with a reboot of Modern Warfare.

Then again, how much life is there in revisiting the past and hand-waving away the direction multiple studios seemed to be invested in?

Time will tell.