10 Video Game Franchises Ruined By Studio Takeovers

While by no means a brand you would necessarily expect to have wall-to-wall great games, The Simpsons managed to have some really choice instalments in its time. Few played The Simpsons: Hit and Run or The Simpsons: Arcade without getting a healthy dose of joy added to their day.

But then EA got its hands back on the Simpsons license in 2005, and things turned south. Though the first game released in this time - unsubtly titled The Simpsons Game - was a lot of fun, and EA had previously published other okay games like Simpsons: Road Rage, there were unfortunate developments brewing. Namely, the sweet temptation of mobile games, as EA Mobile was made the year prior to this acquisition.

As such, the sequel to The Simpsons Game would be nixed, and in its place would come a series of mobile games including Simpsons: Tapped Out, which perhaps unsurprisingly came with a whole lot of microtransactions built in.

The real shame is that this game has some really funny and show-accurate dialogue made for it, which feels almost wasted on a game that is trying to make you continually pay to play it.

With a new game for the next generation scheduled to come out in 2021, we can hope this might spell redemption for a brand that's currently drowning in phone games - but we won't know until it arrives.