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

5. Guitar Hero

The only entry on this list to truly fall victim to its own success, the Guitar Hero franchise became a pop culture phenomenon in 2005, appearing in TV and movies, and becoming the must-have video game item of the year. Its plastic guitar peripheral allowed you to pretend to have the musical talent that you don't by pressing a few plastic keys in time with a cheesy cover version of a classic song, before later games actually employed master recordings of the songs. With 2008, the instrument base had expanded to drums and a microphone in order to compete with rival series Rock Band, but it was at this point that the plastic guitar bubble well and truly burst, as Activision flooded the market with band-centric spin-offs (Aerosmith, Metallica and Van Halen each had their own games), spurious expansions, two DJ Hero games, and a number of portable and mobile games that made the franchise number two-dozen by its end-point. By 2011 the dream was over, and a new Guitar Hero game was cancelled, leaving the franchise deader than dead. If anything can come from this, it should be a lesson that no matter how many billions of dollars you make, more is not always better.