[Interesting Trope] Attempts at fanservice/virality that failed not because they were hated, but because nobody noticed them or cared at all.

[u/mp3help]

1) Hoopy the Hoop, Portal (2007) When you defeat GLaDOS and her room is destroyed at the end of the game, debris rains down in the final cutscene, including a big metal hoop that bounces around a bit. Developer Erik Wolpaw said the team dubbed it "Hoopy the Hoop" and expected it to become the big meme of Portal. Of course, none of the fans paid much attention to the hoop since "The Cake is a Lie" became the biggest meme of the game, and overall one of the biggest video game memes of all time.

2) Burgh, Pokemon Black and White (2010) When designing Burgh, developer Yusuke Ohmura said Gamefreak had many of their female employees give input on his design to create their ideal handsome man. However, as someone who's been in the Pokemon fandom for almost 3 decades, in the 15+ years since Pokemon Black and White released, I have personally never seen any fans swoon over Burgh, or even mention him in general. If anything, characters like N and Colress are far more well-known within the fandom as the most handsome and beloved male characters of Pokemon Gen 5.

[u/5050Saint]

That and terms like Halo-killer or Final Fantasy-killer. It was the click bait of its time.

[u/Lazydusto → u/5050Saint]

Every new MMO was the next WoW-killer too.

[u/jackofallcards → u/Lazydusto]

Which no such MMO exists to this day as WoW is still alive and kicking apparently very well

[u/asphaltdragon → u/jackofallcards]

Eh, alive, yeah, but I wouldn't really say it's kicking. WoW Forever is seeming to take off though. But there's plenty of other MMOs that are just as popular as WoW nowadays. FFXIV has around as many players.

[u/ThrowACephalopod → u/asphaltdragon]

The MMO landscape is just more diverse now. It used to be that people only played WoW and every other MMO was niche and quickly died.

But now we have lots of different games. WoW is certainly still kicking (with retail bringing in the more competitive crowd and forever looking to appeal to the older audience and recapture the magic, so to speak), but FFXIV, ESO, and Old School RuneScape all also have very sizable playerbases.

WoW wasn't really killed, it just has peers now.

[u/Flamingo-Sini → u/asphaltdragon]

There was a short time when FFxIv released Shadowbringers (excellent expansion) and WoW did Shadowlands (absolute dogshit expansion) and FFxIv got more players than WoW for a while. People even talked about an exodus, but that might have been exaggerated. WoW catched itself and got more players again now. Definitly not killed, but dethroned for a short while.

[u/jebberwockie → u/asphaltdragon]

Current retail content patch aside, WoW has been doing very well lately.