Swings and roundabouts, but just like Hollywood, the games industry needs to realise that a bit of money spent on talent upfront can make all the difference to the financial bottom line...

There are probably advantages in games design of having a franchise. You have the basic game engine which you can reuse which saves money. You also have a boost in term of sales because fans will understand the basic plot and whether they want to buy in the first place. Though as you say new games can have some advantages, depending on the game plot.

Not so much the franchises themselves - some of them are quite good, its the publishers like Activision that insist on pumping out endless streams of horse-sh&& rather than try something original. Pretty soon there are going to have nothing left besides Modern Warfare and Guitar Hero.

not such a bad thing for them, both haul in buckets of cash for minimal work

But that is a very short sighted attitude. Once the public bore of the franchises they will have nothing else.

I think franchises are actually essential in a way

If people didn't want to play games like God of War we wouldn't have got Darksiders or Demon Souls

If they didn't want to play MW2 we wouldnt get BFBC or Borderlands

We need both tbh, the new ideas will usually suffer against the incremental brigade of gamers (those whose collection only includes titles with incremental numbers) but that money does towards new IP projects, which usually make a hefty loss in fact

+1, and Darksiders is brilliant