Most Milked Franchise

What is the most Milked?

  • Assasins Creed

    Votes: 20 20.8%
  • Call of Duty

    Votes: 79 82.3%
  • Final Fantasy

    Votes: 9 9.4%
  • Warhammer

    Votes: 7 7.3%
  • Other

    Votes: 7 7.3%

  • Total voters
    96
Before I even saw the list I was saying cod in my head. New game every year since cod 4. What are they on now 15 years in a row with a new release?
 
Call Of Duty, obviously. I'll believe it when I see it if Activision claims there will be no 2023 COD release.

Of course, you can't blame Activision for releasing an annual COD release since it's their best selling franchise and they obviously chose quantity over quality, but if it sells despite lacking innovation, why not. Money wins at the end and that's all it matters for businesses, so I can see their point really.
 
I'm surprised there isn't some superhero franchise like the Captain America and Ironman movies. That franchise, which I cannot stand, will never go away. The following there is massive.
 
Sports games are pretty milked, especially from EA. They practically just release the same game with roster updates every year. They could easily just update rosters for the existing games if they wanted. Even NFL2k1 had this ability on the Dreamcast. And then there is the crazy DLC gambling loot box stuff in FIFA that people spend thousands of dollars on. For the amount of effort they put into development I think sports games are the most milked.

COD is similar to sports games with it's yearly releases, but at least they put a little more effort into it.

Pokemon has a ton of games, many which are nearly the same game, but also has the cartoons, cartoon movies, live action movies, and tons and tons of merchandise.
 
I was going to say number of release and rhythm or release is not necessarily enough, specially if we mean relative to the amount of milks there was to milk.

A bit like a sitcom doing it for very long a sport/unreal tournament type of franchise can have a lot of release that feel more natural to do.

Sports game are still a candidate when a $20 roster/rules/jersey updates instead of a full new installement would have done the trick most years
 
GTA V imho with Skyrim in 2nd place.

At leas the mentioned series they release new games iso milking the same one over and over again.
 
I voted Assassin's Creed, but Call of Duty is actually probably the right answer. Simply because they have three main studios working on games concurrently.

But I think sports games would be the right answer. FIFA and whatever.

Sports games are pretty milked, especially from EA. They practically just release the same game with roster updates every year. They could easily just update rosters for the existing games if they wanted. Even NFL2k1 had this ability on the Dreamcast. And then there is the crazy DLC gambling loot box stuff in FIFA that people spend thousands of dollars on. For the amount of effort they put into development I think sports games are the most milked.

COD is similar to sports games with it's yearly releases, but at least they put a little more effort into it.

Pokemon has a ton of games, many which are nearly the same game, but also has the cartoons, cartoon movies, live action movies, and tons and tons of merchandise.

Pokemon does have some big changes between generations though. They also add and then remove features. Triple battles were only around for Gen 6, and now they dropped mega evolutions which were around for two generations. A lot of builds and teams went away with that. Other things like changes to Gale Wings really changed how effective some flying types were. Sure, if you just play the story, the game is essentially a button click fest designed to be palatable for young kids. But once you get to multiplayer, that is where the strategy comes in.
 
Was thinking Far Cry should be on the list, but CoD is just sorta a king of releasing the same garbage almost anually.
 
COD. with 3 studios working on the same franchise to churn them out quickly, easy winner. But yea, sports games were the next thing that popped in my head.

edit: gonna just quietly say Mario and walk away
 
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Sports games are king of milking. They are game that have the least effort put into every year. They are the worst offenders of MT too. Basically nothing carries over game to game and the money you spent on last year's edition is gone.
 
What are the least milked game franchise in term of sequels opportunity/effort put in them, etc...

Flight Simulator ?
Starcraft/Diablo ?
Half life ?
 
What are the least milked game franchise in term of sequels opportunity/effort put in them, etc...

Flight Simulator ?
Starcraft/Diablo ?
Half life ?
If it weren't for Fallout 76, Id say that series easily. Diablo doesnt belong, that real money auction house will forever live in anger with many of its followers.
 
At one time it was Street Fighter. Capcom was cranking out Street Fighter revisions left and right. Instead of just $60 carts/disks/downloads, Capcom was selling proprietary arcade cabinets, too.
These days, it's Call of Duty along with EA's sports franchises. Neither need an entirely new game very often, but that doesn't stop 'em from doing it. Assassin's Creed is up there, but I do feel like the quality of those games is fairly high. They were phoning them in prior to Origins, but they've put at least some degree of effort into them since.

Two games that deserve an honorable mention are Skyrim and GTA5 all by themselves.
 
If it weren't for Fallout 76, Id say that series easily
Fallout is one release to be easily the least milked video game franchise ?

Without 76 we would still have
Fallout
Fallout 2
Fallout 3
Fallout 4
Tactics
Brotherhood
New Vegas
Shelter
Pinball
Fallout Online experiments

A TV series on Amazon coming up.

I can see an argument, but easily less milked than StarCraft, Duck hunt or Half life ?
 
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GTA V imho with Skyrim in 2nd place.

At leas the mentioned series they release new games iso milking the same one over and over again.
I'm a big Skyrim fan so take the following with a grain of salt. Skyrim was re-released in 2016 and last year's update was a ton of add-on content. Is it still the same game? Yes. But the extra content is cool, and with such a well-established modding community, there are so many new ways to play and I'd find it very difficult to extinguish all the in-game choices, scenarios, etc. it has to offer. I would argue ESO is more milked.
With that said, I do wish they'd get moving on ES6.
 
Fallout is one release to be easily the list milked video game franchise ?

Without 76 we would still have
Fallout
Fallout 2
Fallout 3
Fallout 4
Tactics
Brotherhood
New Vegas
Shelter
Pinball
Fallout Online experiments

A TV series on Amazon coming up.

I can see an argument, but easily less milked than StarCraft, Duck hunt or Half life ?

No way Fallout is. I am going with sports games. Call of Duty is probably one of the best examples for a non-sports game.
 
No way Fallout is. I am going with sports games. Call of Duty is probably one of the best examples for a non-sports game.
That a reverse conversation about the least milked game franchise of all time, someone suggested that it was easily Fallout without Fallout 76.
 
What are the least milked game franchise in term of sequels opportunity/effort put in them, etc...

Flight Simulator ?
Starcraft/Diablo ?
Half life ?

Yeah maybe, they're highly regaurded games with fans begging for more. I think if they did actually attempt to milk Half-Life pe
Fallout is one release to be easily the list milked video game franchise ?

Without 76 we would still have
Fallout
Fallout 2
Fallout 3
Fallout 4
Tactics
Brotherhood
New Vegas
Shelter
Pinball
Fallout Online experiments

A TV series on Amazon coming up.

I can see an argument, but easily less milked than StarCraft, Duck hunt or Half life ?

StarCraft they milked a little bit by selling splitting StarCraft 2 up into 3 purchasble parts WoL, HotS, and LotV. Some people were pissed at the time. There is a little bit of extra DLC in SC2, but that's about it.

Definitely not milked by today's standards.

They didn't even port StarCraft 2 to consoles, and StarCraft 1 was only on PC and N64. They could have made World of StarCraft and a bunch of other games to milk it if they wanted to. They could have made mobile games and all sorts of stuff people would eat up, but they didn't.
They even canceled StarCraft Ghost after years of development because it didn't live up to Blizzard standards at the time.

And SC1 and SC2 are still insanely popular and have good sized tournaments. It has a ton of milk potential.

StarCraft is probably the least milked, I think even less than Half-Life which has 3 games plus more paid expansions, and was also released on just about every console, plus they kind of used it to force Steam onto people. It's probably second place for least milked though. It's still very milkable, but I don't think it has nearly as much milking potential as it used to. They could have made a lot more DLC for Half-Life 2 but now it's a bit late for that. Half-Life Alyx wasn't nearly as big as HL1 and 2, but they'll probably make another Half-Life VR game at some point when they release new VR hardware.
 
When it comes to the sheer number of low effort, no name developer, dropped after release titles I think the trophy goes to Warhammer 40k. Every single year I see multiple mediocre games released under the 40k license. Once in a very long while you get one that's actually fun to play and gets constant content updates and whatnot such as Gladius. Most of the time they die off pretty quick.
 
Sports games are king of milking. They are game that have the least effort put into every year. They are the worst offenders of MT too. Basically nothing carries over game to game and the money you spent on last year's edition is gone.
This. Sports games are king of this. However, for non-sports games, I thought Call of Duty is probably the undisputed king of milked IP's with 19 installments in the franchise not counting books, tie in materials and mobile games.

Call of Duty (2003)
Call of Duty 2 (2005)
Call of Duty 3 (2006)
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007)
Call of Duty: World at War (2008)
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009)
Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010)
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2011)
Call of Duty: Black Ops II (2012)
Call of Duty: Ghosts (2013)
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (2014)
Call of Duty: Black Ops III (2015)
Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare (2016)
Call of Duty: WWII (2017)
Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 (2018)
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019)
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War (2020)
Call of Duty: Vanguard (2021)
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (2022)

However, while Final Fantasy has 15 main installments there are over 50 bearing the Final Fantasy name which are connected with the universe in some way such as prequels, sequels, or spin offs. Call of Duty doesn't even come close to that.
 
You're missing Pokemon on this list. Think about all the non-actual pokemon games out there. All the toys. The cards. The movies. Etc.

I vote Pokemon. Shit, even the actual Pokemon games they've been milking out since Pokemon Yellow. They release a new generation of games, but like a year later release the 'better' version with marginal improvements over that generations base games.

Not even bringing up the fact that Pokemon was basically milking the Megami Tensei series with a more 'accessible' game to begin with.
 
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From the list, I have to go with Warhammer, if for nothing else the expensive toy armies they make their fans buy.

Among video games, Madden or FIFA.
 
You're missing Pokemon on this list. Think about all the non-actual pokemon games out there. All the toys. The cards. The movies. Etc.

I think the FF franchise might be bigger...
 
Sports franchises are the king of milked games by far. Mostly because there's very little difference between games besides rosters as someone has already stated.

CoD definitely has to be the king of non-sports games, though. It's constantly one after another and I don't think there's really much change between them.

Final Fantasy is definitely different, though. While there are a ton of Final Fantasy games (the irony of the title), most of them are at least different in story and there have been many changes with regards to gameplay as well. That's different than releasing the same thing over and over. Quality content with expanded story and gameplay are the absolute opposite of "milking" in my opinion.
 
This. Sports games are king of this. However, for non-sports games, I thought Call of Duty is probably the undisputed king of milked IP's with 19 installments in the franchise not counting books, tie in materials and mobile games.

Call of Duty (2003)
Call of Duty 2 (2005)
Call of Duty 3 (2006)
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007)
Call of Duty: World at War (2008)
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009)
Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010)
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2011)
Call of Duty: Black Ops II (2012)
Call of Duty: Ghosts (2013)
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (2014)
Call of Duty: Black Ops III (2015)
Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare (2016)
Call of Duty: WWII (2017)
Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 (2018)
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019)
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War (2020)
Call of Duty: Vanguard (2021)
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (2022)

However, while Final Fantasy has 15 main installments there are over 50 bearing the Final Fantasy name which are connected with the universe in some way such as prequels, sequels, or spin offs. Call of Duty doesn't even come close to that.

Except FF is not really a "franchise" in the real sense. They're all unique games. Many of them have nothing to do with the others and were only called FF because the Japanese felt (justifiably) that American's were fucking morons. FF Adventure is not called that there, nor is the the entire Mana series that sprung out of it. Japanese games are deliberately dumbed down with lower dificulty and branded differently here because companies run batteries of marketing teams and the American market by far has less tolerance for dificulty and goes with known brands and is risk adverse. This has been widely known and exists for all sorts or products. This only started to change with the Souls series and even that only took off because of a bunch of urbanites who loved imports hawked the hell out of it.

Like it or not America remains the idiot market and while it might be huge that results in bonkers marketing here and games ripped of dificulty. There is no main FF series outside of 7 and its attachments and even those were dumbed down at times.

The true Square/Enix franchise is Dragon Quest which never really took off in the US. I've worked in marketing and dumbing shit down for Americans is a universal tactic and then slapping a brand name on it that may or may not have anything to do with it. We don't do thinking, challenges, or new experiences.
 
Skyrim has so many meem videos on Youtube its a trend was thinking of started a thread about them but some of them are too good.
 
Fallout is one release to be easily the least milked video game franchise ?

Without 76 we would still have
Fallout
Fallout 2
Fallout 3
Fallout 4
Tactics
Brotherhood
New Vegas
Shelter
Pinball
Fallout Online experiments

A TV series on Amazon coming up.

I can see an argument, but easily less milked than StarCraft, Duck hunt or Half life ?
I guess I'm looking at this debate the wrong way. Starcraft, Half Life are series that died by choice of the developer for no known reason. So the term milked or not doesn't really apply. If a true HL3 came out the gaming internet would collectively break like when FO4 was announced.

Fallout is a series that players really wanted to be released more often if they recreated the success of FO3 and New Vegas. FO4 wasnt bad just a rather large change from the previous success. FO76 was a drastic change that split the player base. So Fallout is a series that should be a candidate for more releases. Their history also goes back to 1997. COD is 2003 but the recent decade being where the title has become washed out with its near yearly releases.

Series that are beaten to death are as mentioned above - COD, Battlefield (Just release a new BF4 already), Sports games and so on. All the various simulators, racing games and such would follow next. Far Cry, Assassins Creed and their genre's after that.

You're missing Pokemon on this list. Think about all the non-actual pokemon games out there. All the toys. The cards. The movies. Etc.

I vote Pokemon. Shit, even the actual Pokemon games they've been milking out since Pokemon Yellow. They release a new generation of games, but like a year later release the 'better' version with marginal improvements over that generations base games.

Not even bringing up the fact that Pokemon was basically milking the Megami Tensei series with a more 'accessible' game to begin with.
Pokemon is a different animal. Its just todays version of collecting baseball cards. If you go down this road then Super Mario would be included. Those two are basically Nintendo's entire existence besides Zelda.
 
I guess I'm looking at this debate the wrong way. Starcraft, Half Life are series that died by choice of the developer for no known reason. So the term milked or not doesn't really apply. If a true HL3 came out the gaming internet would collectively break like when FO4 was announced.
Not sure of that logic, a little milked game franchise will be exactly that, game franchise that could have easily made a new instalment that would have made money from pre-sales alone but decided not too (to keep the franchise value and not risk the half effort they could have put into it, not compete their own other projects, etc...).

We will not find a non milked franchise that made new instalments until the next one was not certain to be a giant success, so taking a break made obvious sense.

Fallout, like Elder Scroll is an obvious candidate for more releases and I think we can bet there will one and the wait will not be necessarily longer than what the elder scroll wait will have been (probably shorter).
 
Not sure of that logic, a little milked game franchise will be exactly that, game franchise that could have easily made a new instalment that would have made money from pre-sales alone but decided not too (to keep the franchise value and not risk the half effort they could have put into it, not compete their own other projects, etc...).

We will not find a non milked franchise that made new instalments until the next one was not certain to be a giant success, so taking a break made obvious sense.

Fallout, like Elder Scroll is an obvious candidate for more releases and I think we can bet there will one and the wait will not be necessarily longer than what the elder scroll wait will have been (probably shorter).
I'm not sure of my own logic these days.

I guess my thought is was the series given a chance to be milked? HL and SC got 1 extension and that's it, both with high praise by the community. It didn't die like Command and Conquer and Unreal Tournament did. COD and it's constant releases "forces" the community to move on to the newest. There's also games like World of Warcraft worth mentioning as being dragged on as far as it can go.
 
I guess I'm looking at this debate the wrong way. Starcraft, Half Life are series that died by choice of the developer for no known reason. So the term milked or not doesn't really apply. If a true HL3 came out the gaming internet would collectively break like when FO4 was announced.

Fallout is a series that players really wanted to be released more often if they recreated the success of FO3 and New Vegas. FO4 wasnt bad just a rather large change from the previous success. FO76 was a drastic change that split the player base. So Fallout is a series that should be a candidate for more releases. Their history also goes back to 1997. COD is 2003 but the recent decade being where the title has become washed out with its near yearly releases.

Series that are beaten to death are as mentioned above - COD, Battlefield (Just release a new BF4 already), Sports games and so on. All the various simulators, racing games and such would follow next. Far Cry, Assassins Creed and their genre's after that.


Pokemon is a different animal. Its just todays version of collecting baseball cards. If you go down this road then Super Mario would be included. Those two are basically Nintendo's entire existence besides Zelda.

I don't think HL3 would be nearly as big as people here think it would. Half-Life 2 came out almost 18 years ago. HL1 and 2 were a huge deal to us because most of us are old here and played them while they were new. Half-Life 1 and 2 is older than a lot of gamers are now days, and a lot of them have probably havne't even played a Half-Life game.

Half-Life Alyx came out in 2020 and only sold an estimated 2 million copies. Yeah it's VR only and it did sell some VR headsets, but that's still not very good considering it's a new Half-Life game. Where is the hype?

If Valve did make a Half-Life 3 as a normal (non-VR) PC game it could not live up the 18 years of expectations.
HL1 revolutionionized the FPS genre with it's puzzles, story telling, etc. Half-Life 2 did it again with the gravity gun and all it's other cool never before done tech. There isn't really anything revolutionary a flat PC game could do to live up to the Half-Life name.
That's why the next Half-Life game was VR, and most likely Half-Life 3 (or whatever they decide to make) will also be VR. And I think Valve will wait until they release their next VR headset.

I don't think there is anything they can do to significantly milk it anymore. It's too late for flat PC Half-Life games, and VR isn't big enough yet.

The flat PC cow is too old to milk, and the baby VR cow is too young to milk.

I think Half-Life will be very milkable in the future, but I think Valve is going to continue to guard it and only release new revolutionary 10/10 games with the Half-Life name.
 
I don't think HL3 would be nearly as big as people here think it would. Half-Life 2 came out almost 18 years ago. HL1 and 2 were a huge deal to us because most of us are old here and played them while they were new. Half-Life 1 and 2 is older than a lot of gamers are now days, and a lot of them have probably havne't even played a Half-Life game.

Half-Life Alyx came out in 2020 and only sold an estimated 2 million copies. Yeah it's VR only and it did sell some VR headsets, but that's still not very good considering it's a new Half-Life game. Where is the hype?

If Valve did make a Half-Life 3 as a normal (non-VR) PC game it could not live up the 18 years of expectations.
HL1 revolutionionized the FPS genre with it's puzzles, story telling, etc. Half-Life 2 did it again with the gravity gun and all it's other cool never before done tech. There isn't really anything revolutionary a flat PC game could do to live up to the Half-Life name.
That's why the next Half-Life game was VR, and most likely Half-Life 3 (or whatever they decide to make) will also be VR. And I think Valve will wait until they release their next VR headset.

I don't think there is anything they can do to significantly milk it anymore. It's too late for flat PC Half-Life games, and VR isn't big enough yet.

The flat PC cow is too old to milk, and the baby VR cow is too young to milk.

I think Half-Life will be very milkable in the future, but I think Valve is going to continue to guard it and only release new revolutionary 10/10 games with the Half-Life name.
Agreed, Half Life 1 & 2 were lightning in a bottle. They came out at the perfect time when video cards & game graphics where really starting to give us new features that were "futuristic". I think Half Life 3 missed the train.

If they had had something going when Ray Tracing came on the scene, it could have followed in 1 & 2's footsteps.
 
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