8 Ways Greed Is Wrecking Modern Gaming
1. Milked-to-Death Franchises
The upcoming dual-release of CoD: Infinite Warfare and CoD 4: Remastered will make fourteen Call of Duty titles in thirteen years. Assassin's Creed, meanwhile, has racked up sixteen sequels and spin-offs to the initial game in under ten years. These figures represent an era tainted by corporations abusing fandom and picking on easy-sells, over and over and over again.
Each new release all but strangleholds consumers into a sale by rendering the previous game obsolete, all the while rarely offering more than a slight graphical upgrade from title to title. EA Sports franchises are perhaps most infamous for being milked beyond all sense; the almost religious release of a new FIFA game every single year makes each spend not so much a one-off purchase, but a subscription renewal. The devious intention, clearly, is to create ever-flowing rivers of cash for the board-masters to swim in.
Even more corrosive to the industry, however, is the resultant death of creativity and innovation. Why should studios waste valuable brain cells thinking of new ways to entertain us, when they can just fall back on last year's ready-made franchise? Laziness, it seems, is greed's ugly cousin when it comes to video games.