In the current video game landscape where franchises and sequels seem to be all the rage, you start to wonder what it actually takes to kills a franchise. Of course the simple answer is that there’s a whole number of things that can do it. From one really bad game to a studio going bankrupt, the number of reasons a franchise might die is nearly limitless. When you really start to look at it though, some patterns start to emerge.
First of all, money is almost always the factor with the most potential to keep or kill a franchise. It’s not always the deciding factor, but it certainly holds more power than just about anything else. Take the Call of Duty franchise for example. It’s made over $11 billion in less than a decade and a half and a single Call of Duty game can make upwards of a billion dollars all by itself. No matter how much some gamers might complain about the franchise, there’s no reason for Activision Blizzard to kill it off when they know they can still make massive amounts of money from it.
On the other hand, we have the Assassin’s Creed franchise. After poorer than expected sales and reviews from their last two games, Unity in particular, Ubisoft made the decision to delay the next Assassin’s Creed title. Of course, this is different than killing the franchise altogether, but it’s a preliminary step to making sure that the franchise lives in the coming years.
Of course, it isn’t always all about the money. The best reason why a franchise ends is because the developers stop while they’re ahead and the company that does that best is Naughty Dog. The Jak and Daxter and Crash Bandicoot trilogies that Naughty Dog made were highly successful both critically and in terms of sales. Then there’s the Uncharted series whose fourth and supposedly final game is set to debut in less than two months. Naughty Dog killed all of these franchises (or at least their involvement in them) at just about the exact right time simply because they know when to stop when they’re ahead. Then they can move on to bigger and better things.
Unfortunately, that’s not often the case. More often than not, developers milk franchises to the very last drop. There are other ways they can die too though. More than a few promising franchises have been killed off because something happened to their studios. Frequently when a studio goes bankrupt or is bought out/taken over by another company, their plans get shelved or cancelled altogether. When gaming giant THQ filed for bankruptcy in 2013, that effectively meant the end of all of their storied franchises. From Destroy All Humans! to Red Faction to MX vs. ATV and everything in between, all of THQ’s IPs were sold off to the highest bidder and most of them were effectively killed then and there.
Sometimes franchises are never really killed off at all. Their next games just never come out or they get delayed time and time again until they eventually just fade into oblivion or grow into legends. The Half-life franchise is the best example of the latter. A concluding game to the Half-life saga has been rumored pretty much for the past decade. It’s gotten to the point where another game in the series is more of a running joke than anything else. Half-life has basically become a franchise in a coma.
At least Half-life isn’t Duke Nukem. The Duke Nukem franchise lived a long and glorious life all the way up until 2011 when Duke Nukem Forever came out and nuked it. The game was so horribly awful that it effectively killed the franchise the day it was released. Even if for some reason they eventually came out with another Nukem game, the franchise was irreprehensible tarnished by Forever and will surely never be the same. A nearly identical situation occurred for the Medal of Honor series which EA claims isn’t dead, but we haven’t seen a new game since the disastrous Warfighter in 2012.
These days, it’s tough to know whether a franchise has been killed or not. Naughty Dog is in a minority even suggesting that Uncharted 4 might be the end of the series. Most studios and publishers are reluctant to say one way or the other if a franchise is done for. They like to leave the door open for possible future games, which can ultimately be both fun and frustrating for gamers. It means that we can rejoice knowing that there’s still a hope for our favorite franchises but at the same time, each time EA announces a game that isn’t a new SSX title, we die a little on the inside.
Despite everything, in the end, money is nearly always going to be the biggest deciding factor for a franchise. Just look at the new Star Wars: Battlefront. After years of being delayed and many people assuming the franchise was dead, it sprang back to life just in time to make a ton of money in conjunction with The Force Awakens. The timing was anything but coincidental. The reality is that the gaming industry is first and foremost a business and when it comes to business, money has a louder voice than just about everything else.