We have a franchise problem, don’t we? As far as entertainment goes, everything, everything, has to be a massive franchise these days. Star Wars. Alien. Avatar. Assassin’s Creed. Call of Duty. Final Fantasy. I can go on. Furthermore, a lot of these franchises have successfully crossed over into other media (e.g., from movies to novels, video games and comic books), becoming what’s known as “multi-media franchises.” Some have done a long time ago (meaning in the 80s), like Star Wars and Alien.
But we’re here to talk about the franchise problem in video games.
What’s this purported problem, you ask? A lot of franchises have gone stale. They’re boring. Annoying, even. They’ve milked to death. There are outliers, of course, like the 2024 Indiana Jones game and probably the upcoming GTAVI, but the majority of franchises are just not doing it for me anymore or anyone else. Look at the financial performance of the latest Dragone Age, Prince of Persia and Star Wars games for evidence, if you’re not convinced.
Is it the quality of the games themselves that’s the problem? Partially. I’d say the bigger problem is that many of these franchises have either:
- Outstayed their welcome (looking at you, Star Wars)
or - Lost their identity (or have never had a concrete enough identity to begin with, such as Dragon Age and Prince of Persia)
There are two types of franchise entries:
- Creatively “safe” games that feel overly familiar (your Assassin’s Creed’s and Call of Duty’s).
- Creatively “experimental” games that push the bounds of their respective franchises (think Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown).
Let’s explore how each of these types of franchise entries succeed or fail and how the companies who own the franchises can pivot (if indeed they even can) to find success again.
The “safe” franchise entries
Safe franchise entries are the ones that usually copy everything done by its predecessor to offer a similar or slightly more refined experience. These types of franchise entries would often be built on the same engine, allowing the developers to reuse most of the pre-existing assets (sometimes even the same map, as is the case with Batman: Arkham Origins, for instance), keep the same gameplay mechanics and retain a similar feel to the game (in terms of controls, visuals and so forth).
Such sequels are numerous, and when they work, they really work.
Before I go on, let’s take some time to distinguish entries with a franchise from sequels, since we’ve long since moved past franchises with just a handful of entries. Many franchises span multiple media. A sequel is a game that builds on top of the previous game’s mechanics and/or continue the previous game’s story. For instance, Assassin’s Creed 2 is sequel to the original Assassin’s Creed (it continues the modern-day story of the first game and expands on its mechanics). On the other hand, the upcoming Assassin’s Creed: Shadows is an entry in the franchise, as it does not directly continue the story of the previous game (Assassin’s Creed: Mirage) nor does it build on top of it mechanically.

Assassin’s Creed 2 was an excellent sequel.
Here’s a movie example – Empire Strikes Back is a sequel to the original Star Wars film, while Rogue One is just another entry within the franchise.
What am I getting at here? When you just have a handful of entries in a franchise, it’s a lot easier to create a “safe” sequel that builds on top of the mechanics of the previous game (or games) – especially when that previous game boasted a cool concept, but was otherwise flawed, unrefined or unfinished.
Assassin’s Creed 2 was this type of sequel. Mass Effect 2 was another one. As was Gears of War 2. And Dragon’s Dogma 2, to an extent. The list goes on. They are called “iterative sequels.”
Gears of War, for example, was one of the first third-person cover-based shooters to almost nail the formula, but it was short and rough around the edges. Gears of War 2 was a refinement of everything the first game did – from gameplay to graphics, to story, to sound and everything else. Mass Effect was one of the first games to properly blend RPG mechanics with fast-paced sections, but it was weighed down by oversized areas and empty procedurally generated planets. Mass Effect 2 cut out all the fat and perfected everything that worked. Assassin’s Creed 2 improved on the mechanics of the original Assassin’s Creed and provided greater mission variety.
At the same time, all three of these sequels look very similar to the previous entries. They also play similarly, use the same engine and so on. That’s what iterative sequels are, and they can be very successful and well-received.
This becomes significantly harder when the franchise grows bigger. Assassin’s Creed was able to pull off a good iterative sequel twice in a row – with Assassin’s Creed 2 and Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. Then, things started to falter. Brotherhood’s follow-up, Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, tried to iterate on the previous entry, but ended up making additions that didn’t really improve the core experience (such as crafting and the tower defense side missions). The game ended up existing anyway because Ubisoft wanted to cash in on the brand, not to tell a new story or build on top of what came before.
Then Assassin’s Creed 3 attempted to refine things in a more drastic manner by adding new mechanics, such as naval combat, streamlining others, such as climbing and combat, and expanding the open world, making it the biggest entry in the franchise at the time. Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag perfected those concepts, delivering a much smoother overall experience. However, this was also where the franchise started to deviate from what many would call a “true” Assassin’s Creed game, as Black Flag was less focused on parkour and assassinations and more on naval combat and the fantasy of being a pirate. It became less of an “assassin game” and more of a “pirate game,” basically. At the same time, it was still too similar to what came before, mechanically, and fatigue was beginning to set in (the pirate part is what made it stand out, above all else).

Black Flag is when Assassin’s Creed started losing its identity.
Assassin’s Creed is not the only franchise that struggled with its iterative sequels. God of War: Ascension, a mechanical sequel to God of War 3, didn’t feel like an improvement, the way God of War 3 felt in comparison to God of War 2. Gears of War: Judgement, a mechanical sequel to Gears of War 3, faced a similar issue, in that it didn’t innovate enough, making the franchise feel stale.
As franchises keep growing, developers become more and more desperate in their attempts to reinvent it. The longer they do, the more difficult it becomes. Reinventions often lead to more experimental entries. So, let’s look at those.
The “experimental” franchise entries
Once the formula becomes too stale, developers resort to more drastic solutions. In a perfect world, they could just abandon the franchise altogether and do something else. However, because they work for a soulless corporation that only cares about its bottom line, they end up trying to improve what can no longer be improved.
Assassin’s Creed: Origins was in many ways an iterative sequel to the previous entries. That said, while iterating on many of the previous mechanics, such as parkour and exploration, it has also either sidelined many of the old mechanics or removed them entirely. While the earlier titles borrowed their structure from Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto games, Origins and its follow-ups decided to borrow from The Witcher 3 instead, turning what were essentially open-world action-adventure games with cinematic flair into open-world RPGs with a proper leveling system, tons of quests and even more loot (and later, dialogue options).
By all accounts, this was a successful reinvention, as Origins made bucketloads of money, and so did its two follow-ups, Odyssey and Valhalla, both of which were as iterative as it gets. From the looks of it, Shadows won’t be a reinvention either. In fact, it’s hard to imagine what Assassin’s Creed should even be these days. Should it be a cinematic stealth game with the same mechanics as the earlier games but more refined? Or should it be an even deeper RPG with more character customization options, branching narratives and improved writing? Hard to tell. The franchise is now all over the place.
Some might say it’s lost its identity, even. I agree.
God of War is in a similar boat. God of War (2018) was a successful reinvention of the formula. Prior titles were fast-paced button-mashers in the vein of Devil May Cry, with edgy stories and an even edgier protagonist (in the first game, Kratos burns an innocent guy alive just to open a door). The newer titles, such as God of War (2018) and its iterative sequel, Ragnarök, decided to focus more on exploration and storytelling, delivering a more self-reflective protagonist, bigger worlds and even more cinematic flair (now, Kratos is a big soft papa bear).
Doom (2016) was another successful reinvention – and a follow-up to a less-than-successful reinvention in Doom 3. While Doom 3 was a slow, horror-focused first-person shooter – much slower than its predecessors, in fact – Doom (2016) was fast and frenetic, faster than most first-person shooters at the time (and far, far faster than the original titles). Its sequel, Doom Eternal, doubled down on this, becoming even faster and even more chaotic. Thankfully, the next game in the franchise, Doom: The Dark Ages, is going to pull back from that, a little. But again, it looks like id Software is stuck iterating on what arguably shouldn’t or can no longer be iterated upon (I hope I’m wrong though!).

Doom (2016) was a fantastic reinvention of the franchise.
Other examples of successful franchise reinventions include Tomb Raider (2013), Fallout 3, The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Far Cry 3, Resident Evil 4 and 7, Grand Theft Auto 3, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Might and Magic 6 and on and on. There’ve been a lot.
On the other end you have BioWare, which has lately become synonymous with unsuccessful reinventions. Mass Effect became an open-world RPG in Andromeda, while Dragon Age became a hack-and-slash adventure in The Veilguard, neither of which sold well enough. While I’d argue that the latter was more on-brand for the company (since both Jade Empire and the Mass Effect trilogy were linear-ish action titles at heart), the reinvention failed to grasp enough people to make it a success. And now BioWare is stuck reinventing Mass Effect again – instead of working on something new.
In the case of BioWare, I’d argue that it was stuck in the reinvention phase for too long – and didn’t deliver games that were worth the wait. Andromeda came out five years after its predecessor, Mass Effect 3, and it was a buggy mess on launch and only passable as an open-world game (it didn’t help that this was a crowded market at the time). By contrast, Assassin’s Creed: Origins launched only two years after the previous title and was far less buggy.
The Veilguard, while not buggy, took too long to launch (a full decade!), and while good, arguably wasn’t worth the wait (or the money BioWare probably spent making it).
Other less-than-successful franchise reinventions (largely in the commercial sense, not critical) are DMC: Devil May Cry, Alone in the Dark (2008 and 2024), Turok (2008), Prince of Persia (2008) and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown (2024).
When reinventing a franchise, you either need to do it fast, to cash in on the relevance of the brand, or come up with a killer hook that can draw in players without relying on the brand as a crutch. For instance, I would argue that Andromeda was just not good enough to compete with games like Breath of the Wild or Horizon: Zero Dawn, two other open-world games released in at the time. In fact, when it comes to story – which is BioWare’s specialty – Andromeda lost to Zero Dawn in a big way. And what’s crazy is that Horizon was a brand-new IP at the time.
The fatigue
What unites all modern franchises together is their struggle stay relevant and ever more profitable as time goes on. The brands become stale, accumulating more and more baggage the longer they exist. It doesn’t help that companies rely on franchises as their main source of income, as is the case with Ubisoft and its Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry franchises. In fact, Ubisoft barely makes any games outside of those franchises, though occasionally it would dip its toes into “originality” with multiplayer-only titles like XDefiant, For Honor and Skull and Bones.
Some franchises attempt to shed the baggage in the story sense by utilizing reboots, like Doom (2016) and Tomb Raider (2013). Others keep the story baggage, but try to reinvent their core gameplay, such as Assassin’s Creed: Origins and God of War (2018).
Yet in both cases, the baggage is still there. In the case of Tomb Raider (2013), for instance, Lara Croft, the titular “tomb raider,” is still the protagonist, and it’s nearly impossible not to compare her to the previous iterations of the character. Same goes for Doom (2016), which, while excellent, lacks the spookiness and twisty level design of the original Doom. Again, comparison is impossible. Furthermore, Tomb Raider (2013) is still a third-person action-adventure game, while Doom (2016) is still a first-person shooter. They are forever trapped in their respective genres – though Tomb Raider (2013) does cross over into survival horror territory a little bit, to its credit.

No franchise can ultimately escape its own shadow.
This leads to fatigue. A feeling of things being copy-pasted. Doom (2016) and the original Doom are as different-looking as games can be, given how far apart they are in terms of age (as a reminder, the original title launched in 1993 – 32 years ago, as of 2025). Yet both games are still Doom. They both involve guns, demons (many of the same demons, in fact), metallic corridors, fiery pits of hell, Mars, and of course, shooting. Lots and lots of shooting. Plus, Doom (2016) serves up plenty of references to the past titles. Franchise games can’t escape the shadow of their own brand.
Why? Because of expectations. Developers cannot deviate too far from the core vision behind the brand, no matter how hard they try, and that constrains them, creatively.
These constraints, ultimately, lead to players not being fully satisfied with the final product, even if its quality is superb (which it arguably is with the 2016 Doom), because it can’t wow them like before. Okay, maybe Doom (2016) could, in my case, but Tomb Raider (2013) could not (though I did like it).
No matter, fatigue and familiarity become inevitable within long-running franchises, especially when they’re operating in a medium as creative as video games.
The path forward
I’d say the path forward should be the abolishment of franchises and a push for innovation, but in the AAA space, that’s probably unlikely. The desire to opt for the safest option financially is just too tempting. Necessary even, if these companies want to keep growing.
That said, Ubisoft’s string of financial failures, which includes a Star Wars game of all things, proves that brands aren’t everything. You need to maintain brands through actions – by providing products that deliver something unique. Ubisoft’s latest Star Wars game looks no different from its other games. It’s constrained both by the company’s unwillingness to innovate and the Star Wars brand itself (which was somewhat cheapened through oversaturation).
Franchises can’t rely on their name alone. They need a unique hook. Ubisoft, you’ve done this before. Look at Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. It was one of the smoothest 3D platformers at the time, with a cool time-rewinding mechanic. The Lost Crown was good, but it was still a metroidvania, in a market full of such games. Brand isn’t enough to hook players.
Overall, given the fatigue with so many current brands, I’d argue that now is the time to innovate. 2007 was the year when many of the modern gaming franchises were born, including Mass Effect, The Witcher and Assassin’s Creed.
Companies that step up today – whether they are AA, AAA or indie – and capitalize on the current franchise fatigue will reap the rewards tomorrow. Some contenders for the “next big franchise” include Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Ghost of Tsushima/Yotei, Death Stranding and Outer Worlds. Let’s see who comes out on top.