Chade on 6/6/2013 at 05:01

---

Best of luck!



Certainly there are exceptions to any general principle that you might apply, but if we were to actually do the work and gather the data, I'd expect to see a power law at work, with the lowest levels taken to be the general principle, and Half-Life and Bethdesa's games being the exceptional cases at the far end of the curve.



I wonder if the current commercial model, where they get exactly the same amount of money from hardcore fans as they do from casual users, could actually make it harder to make the sort of deep games we'd like to see. I wonder how much people here would pony up, on average, to get a "traditional" thief game, and how much it would change if it was payed up-front vs payed over a period of time as the player continues to enjoy the game.

(Of course there are collectors editions, but this rewards them for hyping up gamers at the point of purchase, not for offering an experience that builds loyalty.)



That's certainly true, but my guess is that relatively few newcomers join, at least in most cases. I think most of the value of most fan-made content is the entertainment provided to already loyal fans.

Returning to that quote you highlighted from the article: My claim is that:

* the survival of the franchise == the number of people who will buy the game because of the influence of the older games, and
* the majority of people who will buy the new game because of the older games are people who have played the old games and enjoyed them, but have not played much fan-made content.

Starker on 6/6/2013 at 11:58

---

Which brings us to the concepts of "imagined franchise" and "franchise disloyalty"...

(http://www.nma-fallout.com/article.php?id=34629)

[QUOTE=]This chapter is about an "imagined franchises." While a game may stand alone as a set of programs for developers or an experience for players, each person who plays the game or participates in the creation of a game draws from it their own impressions and experiences. Once a game goes into sequels, the game begins to develop a notion of franchise among both developers and fans - essentially notions of expectations, values and constraints defined by the understood tenets of the game.

[...]

It is clear that the values Fallout fans can agree on are inherent to the series are actually inherent to the franchise, simply because the franchise does not exist as any asset outside of people's imaginations, even if it is an asset in a legal sense.

[...]

But you can make a franchise crumble in less obvious ways. Fallout is seen to have a number of inherent factors such as choice-and-consequence, SPECIAL system (and thus isometric view and turn-based combat), dark ironic humor, PA-50's Americana sci-fi, well-written NPCs and dialog, talking heads, the opportunity to pursue either a "good" or "evil path" or a combination of the two, and so on and so forth. These factors, together with a number of facets people probably never noticed, are so intertwined within the experience that removing any one would cause a domino effect which would hollow out the franchise completely.

This is what happened with X-Com Enforcer. This is what happened with Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. It is thus not surprising that these games were complete failures. This has nothing to do with their quality as games. Rather, it was because the developers use of the franchise name meant that these games were not judged as individual games but rather as parts of an existing franchise with highly developed and well received elements. By ignoring the central tenets, the developers failed to incorporate the necessary requirements which form the expectations of the franchise. Essentially, by failing to abide by the expectations built by the history of the franchise, the developers did what is traditionally known as "ignoring the fanbase". But discounting the imagined understanding that has been built by the history of the franchise and its fans is both a broader and more destructive choice than "just" ignoring the fans.

One might believe that the qualities of the individual games are more important than the "imagined" franchises in part because the success of the franchise depends, over time, on the success of the individual games. But actually that is pretty far from the truth. Much like invoking the name of a philosophy, religion or nation, by using the name of a series which, through shared perceptions and expectations, has become a franchise, the game is obliged to not only uphold the standards of quality expected of any game, but must also uphold and conform to the standards of the franchise. Otherwise it suffers a great risk of becoming valueless as a contribution to the imagined franchise.

Keep in mind that this is "just" a risk. Not all series die with reform. By dropping the central tenets of an old franchise and renovating the game inside-out, one kills off all ties to the franchise existing fan base. But this does not obstruct the creation of a new fanbase. This is what is known as franchise disloyalty, with the Elder Scrolls series often cited as an example.