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Notes -
You've succinctly explained my major issues with how the game industry handles/ruins popular IPs and blows up game studios' reputations with the hopes of making quick money at the expense of gaining loyal customers. Which also happens in other industries, but probably to a lesser degree.
Right now I think Rockstar is the only game company that has retained an impeccable reputation for the sheer quality of every product. And they've got a stranglehold on a global, multi-billion dollar market because of it. (EDIT: I forgot Valve, but they currently have a reputation for rarely releasing games, these days)
And even that came under threat from releasing a poorly-done remaster of their previous games.
It also has a reputation for crunch, burnout, and generally being a miserable company to work for, but honestly that seems necessary for achieving greatness in this competitive industry.
If you tried to distill a GTA game down to its minimal elements, a naive person would probably say "You can steal cars, drive them around a huge map, shoot bystanders, fight the cops, and enjoy a story full of 'colorful' characters and crude humor. Also you can bang hookers."
And then you try to make a game that meets that minimal description and you get the Saints Row series. Which really only gained popularity when it took off in its own direction by leaning into absurdity, parody, and optimizing for 'fun.'
And, of course, recently blew up its goodwill with a shitty attempt to reboot that series. Nobody even TALKS about it anymore.
Probably because some MBAs tried to distill Saints Row down AND take it in a stupid direction.
Surely there are other game companies with impeccable reputations, right? From Software is extremely respected, for instance; I would also put Nintendo in the running for mostly having very well made games put out for their main IPs (maybe not Pokemon, but I don't care about Pokemon). Perhaps also Remedy Entertainment, maybe a little lesser known.
It does make me realize how many IPs on this page have had at least one serious misstep, though.
How about Atlus? MegaTen/Persona?
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Could count it. Demon Souls came out in 2009, and every game since then appears to have been a banger and financially successful. They get points for being prolific in that period, vs. Rockstar.
Also fair. I'd literally put them in a class of their own. I want to read a book that explains how they have such high levels of quality control for even the silliest of their game releases.
Now I'm trying to think of any IPs or studios that had a horrible sequel that trashed the series' reputation, only to come roaring back with a later entry.
Maybe Resident Evil? I know that it allegedly fell off after RE5 (the last one I played) but Village was well-regarded and popular.
Final Fantasy XIV might count here. In that case it was the same game which came back, but it came back in a big way.
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Heroes of Might and Magic, perhaps? 5 is considered much better than 4 (I think. I mostly know 3). Hm. There's got to be better examples out there.
A month late, but what the hey, I'm an M&M fan.
I don't think HoMM is a great example for this, particularly because in hindsight I believe 4 has had quite a positive reappraisal. 4 was very different to 3, which provoked a backlash and a lot of hate, but now that there have been many more games afterwards, including 5 (which was a very traditional return to the formula of 2 and 3), there's much less reason to hate 4. As a result, today 4 has a real fanbase of its own.
5 was then, as you say, a great success. Generally I believe 2, 3, and 5 are considered 'the good ones' of the HoMM series, and of those 2 is often overlooked because frankly everything 2 does well is done better in 3. In general it's 3 and 5. Those are the highest.
6 is another 4, in that it's an attempt to push the envelope and do something quite different. I'd argue that 6 has its merits, but in general it's thought of quite poorly, especially due to a truly dire attempt at online functionality that just does not work. Still, 6 experiments with a lot of interesting ideas (a persistent metagame system, hero alignment, specialist classes return from 4, town conversion, and an attempt to privilege factional unit synergies over just picking the strongest units of every faction along with buffing low-tier units), but they don't all work out (in particular the latter issue often led to cookie-cutter armies that made the game feel repetitive). In a better world, 6's good ideas would have been iterated on and refined for the future, while the bad ideas left out.
Unfortunately, 7 was a mess. 7 was at least conceptually an attempt at something like 5 - previous game experiment a bit much, let's go back to the formula. 7 is basically a straight-down-the-line imitation of 3 and 5. Unfortunately, 7 is also a low-budget affair that didn't have enough development time, so it reuses lots of graphical assets from 6, and it's slow and buggy and has horribly broken AI. You can look at 7 and see a bunch of neat ideas or things that would work if the game were not a dog's breakfast in terms of polish, but unfortunately, it is.
And it seems, tragically, that 7 killed the mainline HoMM series. There might have been a comeback, except Ubisoft didn't greenlight another one. Considering what a low-budget affair 7 was, and how else Ubisoft tried to exploit the IP with cheap spin-offs (with the notable exception of Clash of Heroes, which is fantastic), my guess is that turn-based strategy games just don't sell well enough for Ubisoft to consider them worth funding properly.
Except...
Now they're making Olden Era.
Now Olden Era looks like an indie-style game, closer to Songs of Conquest than to HoMM 6 or 7, and maybe that's a good sign. Maybe Unfrozen have the time and money to make a polished, high-quality release, and not chasing a triple-A style release will help it. I very much hope that's the case.
On the other hand... Ubisoft do not have a good record here, and their ability to screw up HoMM development is impressive, so a very high level of caution is warranted.
Meanwhile the Russian guys behind Horn of the Abyss are continuing to put out excellent, professional-level updates for the third game for free, so that is a strong consolation.
It was my understanding that, at least among more casual strategy gamers, it's always been specifically III that's considered the stone-cold classic and the definitive entry in HoMM series, no? Olden Era seems to specifically harken to HoMM III.
To answer the original question, while not completely the same, Civ III tends to be considered one of the weaker iterations of Civilization, with Civ IV better appraised.
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