Executive Meddling/Tabletop Games

Sometimes the higher-ups stack the deck against a game:

Card Games

 * In an example of distributor meddling, Upper Deck Entertainment has pressured Konami into letting them rearrange the rarities, severely alter the construction of the Structure Decks brought over, and create their own cards for the newest Yu-Gi-Oh! collectible card game sets. Why would they make such a drastic move? Simple: the head of the YGO branch of UDE thought he could make the game better than Konami could, and demanded the chance to prove it, thus separating a game that had just begun to be unified.
 * Honestly, Konami is just as bad. Chaos, the new "Psychic" monsters, introducing new concepts with weak backup, neglecting the Thunder, Fish, and Plant types although they are getting better at supporting those. That doesn't go into the rulings of the cards themselves, targeting and non-targeting, and a whole bunch of complicated rules. A popular phrase to describe a justification of a ruling that makes no sense? BKSS, because Konami said so.
 * Unfortunately, this has recently exploded into a legal shitstorm between the two, with Konami attempting to take back the distribution rights of the TCG and Upper Deck suing them for breech of contract. The battle is still ongoing, and already the distribution schedule for North America has become the first casualty.
 * And that's over, thanks to a revealing legal moment of Too Dumb to Live where UDE had outsourced the ability to reprint some cards which were deemed counterfeit. Konami still releases North American exclusive cards, but getting its beloved game out of the hands of UDE was a step in the right direction.
 * Unfortunately, Konami really loves screwing the TCG to make people buy more packs. Examples include increasing the rarity of the most expensive card in Japan's game from a 1 in 5 chance to 1 in 23, turning a single rare card (1 in 2) into a secret (1 in 31 at the time). Their biggest offense has been turning 2 commons (4 in 1 for Japan, 8 in 1 everywhere else) into Ultra Rares (1 in 12). Grow up Bulb, a common in the OCG, is looking to be bumped to Secret as well.
 * Interestingly, in the wake of this, Blizzard Entertainment has subsequently created a new branch dedicated solely to taking back their World of Warcraft CCG. That's right, one moment of idiocy from UDE has now lost them two of their greatest Cash Cow Franchises.
 * This is understandable on Blizzard's part due to the fact that certain "loot" cards, about the equivelent of an Ultra or Secret rare, have a direct tie-in to Blizz's beloved World of Warcraft. If UDE had (it is closed as of this edit) messed with the cards, they might have messed with those cards. In the actual card game, they are immensly useful if weird cards, while in the MMO they are purely cosmetic (mounts, new hearthstone casting animation, ect). Should something useful be put in, the MMO fanbase as well as the card fanbase would have been pissed. And we know how that would have went.
 * WWE Raw Deal suffered from this several times, due to the fact that everything had to be approved by the WWE. The broadest rule was that wrestlers no longer with the company could not continue to get card support, which would eventually cause that wrestler's cards to be difficult to find and also cause them to lag behind other wrestlers in viability. At times changes in the roster would force a change: Muhammad Hassan was planned for the Unforgiven set, but after the infamous terrorist angle and his subsequent departure, he had to be pulled and replaced with Gene Snitsky. At times even actual CARDS were changed: Road Dogg, X-Pac, Billy Gunn, and Kane had a card called "Tori Enters The Fray", but after she departed, it could no longer be made. It eventually was remade as "Help Is On The Way", which did not have nearly the same context as the original, though the cards were the same.

Tabletop Roleplaying Games
"Ed Greenwood: although Newt Ewell specifically asked me to add a brief “drow biomech” section to the original (2nd Ed) DROW OF THE UNDERDARK, the “official but secret” design directives of the time were to avoid all “android and robot” flavouring in AD&D® because TSR was planning a robot roleplaying game, PROTON FIRE. Longtime DRAGON® readers may recall that it was featured in the back pages of just one issue of the magazine, as a preview; the game was “killed” on the very brink of its release by TSR’s upper management. So, just like de-emphasizing psionics in the Realms because they were to be a cornerstone of Dark Sun®, we were told to avoid mechanical/robotic/android/bionic elements for the AD&D® game."
 * TSR, between its "Code of Ethics" and management having its own ideas about how things should work - such as thinking that gimmick-based world building is great. Or sometimes picking and dropping "strategical decisions" apparently at random right in the middle of developers already doing something else.
 * For Dungeons and Dragons - see e.g. here:

"[Lawrence Schick 's] original skill system was much simpler than the one that appeared in Alpha Dawn. He found it strange that the TSR editors made the skill system more complex with the move to Alpha Dawn, since overall it was their intention to make the game simpler."
 * The creators of the Planescape and Al-Qadim settings for have both commented that they were fortunate TSR bosses expected a different setting to be the Next Big Thing, and so were breathing down those developers' necks, and leaving them to do whatever they wanted.
 * Star Frontiers originally was not supposed to have the Sathar, but had the fifth PC species, S'sessu, as appeared later. As such, there was no war with universally hated enemy - it was rocket-punk with Mega Corps, pirates and all that. So, of course, the bright idea was "Hurr, we need Mordor".
 * The game part was originally streamlined, so

"Tech was drawn from literary science fiction, favoring "hard sci fi". Railguns were in the original game as artillery pieces, but for some reason replaced by Recoilless Rifles in the AD game."
 * Then there were changes hard to explain by anything other than either individual manager's personal tastes or desire to do something random for the sake of some activity appearing in the report:

"...and she killed Star Frontiers to start a Buck Rogers line at TSR. Her take on this move was that even if TSR lost money, her family would make money through licensing fees."
 * Then, of course, that infamous turn when TSR got the new manager.