The perfect example of this was the Sim City series. Sim City was the go-to series if you wanted a city building game for over twenty years. EA gets their hands on it, mandated online connectivity, screwed the launch up, screwed the servers for the game, and was overall so disastrous that the studio responsible for Sim City had to be closed down.
The funny part is you're actually underselling how bad that launch was. Paradox was afraid to green-light
Cities: Skylines as they feared that SimCity had such a stranglehold on that niche. It's the same exact reason why no one makes a Sims-like game, as publishers are afraid to make the game because they know consumers will default to buying the
Sims even if their new game is the superior product.
SimCity (2013) was such a horrendous launch that it convinced Paradox to green-light
Cities: Skylines, which has now blown up in popularity and has entirely replaced
SimCity as the go-to "city builder simulation game" on the market. The horrible launch also caused EA to remove their "always-online" feature from their upcoming games like
Sims 4. EA now has to constantly worry about some random autistic fucks like Paradox capitalizing on their failings and seizing the markets they have a monopoly on. It's exactly why EA magically decided to give a fuck when
Callisto Protocol got announced as "the spiritual successor" to the
Dead Space series. The moment they caught wind of that shit, they immediately started development on the remake of
Dead Space to counter it.
Blizzard is one of the most notorious in the industry for their "kill the potential competition in the crib" approach. They know that their competition could get their shit together later on if they have a half decent launch so they plan a lot of their releases to coincide with their competition. Since Blizzard "had" a reputation for making great games, they were able to force the customer to decide between the 2 games and neuter their competition's potential growth
>Battleborn releases May 3rd, 2016. Blizz sets Overwatch release to May 24th, 2016.>Blizz has Tomb of Sargeras in Patch 7.2.5 but they stagger the release date of the raid itself to June 20th, 2017, the same day as FF14's Stormblood launches>Ashes of Creation plans Alpha One for June 1st, 2021. Blizzard rushes TBC Classic out to have it launch the same day, which causes AoC to delay their date to July.