10 Biggest Gaming Franchises With So Many Entries It's Just Offensive

9. Need For Speed

2014 marks the 20th year of the Need for Speed franchise, and just today it was announced that despite the success of last year's Rivals, developer Ghost Games are suffering layoffs at the moment, resulting in the delay of the upcoming NFS game that was in production there. Sad news though the layoffs are, stepping back from the annualised releases is probably a good thing for the series, which has gone through several incarnations over the years, though has in recent times become pretty indistinguishable. The first big change for the series came with 2003's Underground, where developers opted to pounce on the success of the Fast and the Furious movies, focusing on street racing and Nitrous Oxide-assisted play, before returning to the more conventional cops and robbers shtick with 2005's Most Wanted. This continued until 2011's ill-advised The Run (which featured QTE on-foot sequences), at which point the series turned into a rather good Burnout clone, due to 2012's Most Wanted being developed by Criterion Games, who had actually worked on the Burnout series. When Ghost Games took over for Rivals, they carried that same spirit with them. With 20 titles released over 20 years, it's safe to say that these games have pretty much done it all despite how fun they are. I'm fed up of the series re-using names like "Most Wanted" and "Hot Pursuit", as sure a sign of the series' lack of originality as anything. These games don't need to be annual, and it's just EA up to their usual greedy tactics.