Metagame 007: This is How a Franchise Dies
Hope y'all had a good Halloween! I'm turning into that old guy: my son was complaining about trick or treating in the rain and I hit him with the - when I was a kid, there was a giant snowstorm in 1995 and I had to trick or treat in a blizzard. You hate to see it.
Speaking of my son, we were gifted this box of Pokemon cards from some friends that were visiting from Japan and Ben got an insane pull out of them. I do fear I'm raising a young gambling addict.
The card is a Lugia 30th-anniversary reprint of an old e-Card-era design. Pokemon is one of those things I remember playing on my gameboy as a kid, although at the time, I was just a little too old to publicly declare my love of it. So not cool.
But it got me thinking about the state of gaming franchises. Pokemon is obviously just crushing it these days, it's truly transcended. But with all the talk of Mass Effect last week, I started doing some research on the current state of gaming franchises and I think we're at a weird inflection point.
1. The Future of Gaming Franchises
We'll get more to it in a separate story down below, but with the mixed launch Gears of War E-Day, it really makes you wonder if people care about modern gaming franchises at all. In Xbox's promotional assets for their upcoming anniversary, Gears of War was one of 3 franchises featured, along side Halo.
It feels like there's a shift in the franchises we have now vs. the state of where franchises are going. The old ones are dying and we don't truly know what's next and new. Because don't get me wrong, Steal a Brainrot can be a mega game on Roblox, but it's not a franchise.
If you look at the state of gaming franchises, it's pretty bleak out there. I think Nintendo does some of the best franchise management out there: Mario, Pokemon, Zelda, Kirby, etc. It's clear what these franchises are, and they know how to make new games and experiences that extend them for generations. Nintendo is probably the closest thing we have to a modern day Disney. Honestly, Disney should just buy Nintendo lol.
But you might be like, yo Tone, these legacy franchises are what make a ton of money: WoW Forever, every CoD games, etc. And I think yes, there's safe money to be had in building games around existing franchises. But I think about what's happening like private equity - designed to squeeze out as much monetary value before they move on.
It's just how decision making at large corporations work. To take a real risk, make something special, you have to be able to bet on something that feels wild, out of left field. But think about most of the executives you know. They are saving for their 2nd or 3rd house. I worked with a VP who would constantly talk about, to the team, how hard his life was because he had just gotten his third house and needed to make more money to pay for the renovations.
Like, do you really think any of these people are going to put their jobs on the line for a risky idea when it risks losing their job to pay for the third house? Of course not. But something worse happens at companies like this.
No one wants to admit they don't take risks. And so they SAY they champion risk. Lift it up. But in reality, they just spin something that was successful and say look - we took a risk on that, when often times, it's not really risky. It's just propping up the status quo. Or, they actually actively fought the work along the way, and now take credit for it.
This is why most franchises die. It's not that they don't have staying power. It's just that most of them are managed in the safest way possible to guarantee the company will hit the targets it needs to it, which means the safest option always.
EA is the literal case here. It's carrying about $18 billion of buyout debt and chose a "safe" licensed brand (Star Wars) over its own that it owns fully outright (Mass Effect).
Greg Zeschuk said it in an interview this week, "Because none of these people have ever made a game, like, never really sat and made one." They sure do like money though for that third house.
But it's not all depressing. It means we're living in an interesting era where the creation of the next generation of franchises is happening. Take Expedition 33 - is it going to be a long standing franchise? Who knows. But this is where potential comes from.
In a weird way, it's almost fitting that Mass Effect died, even though it breaks my heart. It's the perfect encapsulation of this story: an IP from an older generation that was mismanaged into the ground and lost all relevancy. And so the right question is - what is the NEXT Mass Effect. That's the work that's exciting as fuck to me. That's my dream job. I'd work on that for ages. Anyone wanna do it with me? lol.
2. Mediocre Nostalgia Bait
Gears of War: E-Day launched to some pretty decent metacritic reviews, scoring an 87, which is the best reviewed Gears game since the Xbox 360 era. It was also the second largest Xbox launch of the year, behind Forza Horizon 6. As standalone sentences, that sounds pretty good. But there are some things that make the launch of this game... confusing. And shows some softening.
First, it doesn't seem like people are naturally excited about the game. When you look up the conversation around Gears, when you move past the culture war stuff, it's just basically post acknowledging, yup, the game is out. Which is not a strong indicator of deep fandom.
And the posts you do see are all variations of a theme from Laura Fryer, executive producer on the original Gears. In a video she posted about the franchise, she says that what makes E-Day feel a little flat is that for a game marketed as being nostalgically Gears, they they handed all the main hero moments to everyone but the original main characters: Marcus and Dom.
And that analysis is landing. Take this comment from the video which sums it up:
The thing that hits me about this comment and the engagement around the game is, once you move passed the culture war stuff, it seems like people are searching for a reason to explain why they left feeling empty after playing the game.
And then, there's the cost of the game itself, a solid $500M budget (pre-marketing), which started as anonymous sourcing from Kotaku but then later confirmed by Jason Schreier. It's an insane budget. According to Alinea, the game sold 230k copies in the first week, with 1.7M Game Pass players (of which 722k paid $30 for 5 days of early access). Which is roughly $37M of first week revenue and perhaps just a little short of that $500M budget.
This ends up being the perfect example of this week's theme. The game was marketed as pure nostalgia bait. Remember that feeling Gears used to give you? Come on back and get that high again! But then instead of giving you that high, the game focuses on characters who are not Dom and Marcus - a feeling of a bait and switch.
I think this comment from dunkey's video helps capture the weird feeling players are having:
Which again translates to, somethings off but I can't really tell you what it is. Now you might be thinking, Tone, you're a fucking hypocrite. You just spent the first story talking about how franchises don't take risks, but here's E-Day focusing on a new character, Mags Carter and subverting the expectations of the franchise.
Taking risks doesn't mean just throwing out what people loved so you can do something different. It gives the feeling of Star Wars Episode VIII. You can tell someone on some level understands what players loved about the franchise, because it shows up in all the trailers. But you gotta know the deep passion. What gets a player out of bed to share something for generations with people. You find that energy. Bottle it. And build off that. Translate that unadulterated feeling for a new era of fans. Real creative risk must be inspired from a core insight. It can't just be shaking things up for the sake of it.
THIS is how you watch a franchise die over time. It's not huge blatant mistakes. It's a series of slow mismanagement, a lack of real creative risk taking, and decision makers who don't understand what made the original thing special. I remember EXACTLY what it was like the first time I took a chainsaw to the face in the first Gears of War. But that trope has been so played out now.
Someone trying to reboot the franchise should ask themselves - how would I create that same visceral feeling for the first time in 2026? Instead, we got a game that cost $500M in development to use the same core gameplay mechanics unchanged, and then introduce new characters in an ORIGIN story instead of focusing on the characters they loved.
Now that I type it. No wonder it went the way it did.
3. Mass Effect Lost to a Spreadsheet
I touched on it in the first story, but Mass Effect lost out to Star Wars. Which again, that article I wrote about Mass Effect years back is really becoming more prescient lol. There's no other way to say it. EA is now drowning in fucking debt.
After being bought by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners for $55 billion, a deal of which that generated a very casual $18 billion of debt; one might say they gotta find that money fast. And as someone looks to find giant savings quickly, it makes sense that executives would look at their portfolio and say - hey! We got two space adventure games. I think I know how we can save some money!
And this shit grinds my gears. I get it, I get why someone would choose Star Wars over Mass Effect when you're drowning in $18 billion dollars of debt. But THIS IS HOW CREATIVITY DIES PEOPLE. When you're forced into a crazy financial situation that you can't make the right decisions for players or what makes the best possible product.
What are you supposed to do when the development of the new Gears cost $500M? What are you supposed to do when you need to find $18 billion dollars over the next couple years?
But think about what someone could do, and the decisions one could make, if they weren't trying to close an $18 billion dollar gap. Oh man, sure, Star Wars is a known entity, but we have to pay a licensing fee for every game we make. I'm also sure there's some rev share involved. Why not continue developing the space IP we have and own in full, so that some day it can make more money than Star Wars, and crazy thought, be bigger than Star Wars!
That's the kind of long term value planning and risk taking you can take when you're not drowning in debt. But because of that, you are forced to take the conventional safe bets because those executives gotta show progress to keep making renovations to that third house.
But when BioWare has also been mismanaging its own franchises, similar to the Gears story, I get why you wouldn't be confident in taking a bet on the studio or the franchise either. Why not go Star Wars.
This video essay is actually a pretty good summary of the situation: "EA Can't Afford to Care", which makes the same argument about the debt.
And so the #SaveMassEffect campaign continues, with fans asking the IP to be sold to someone else for development. Consider me skeptical to be honest. I think EA thinks there's more value in vaulting it and keeping it under their watch than watching someone beat them with it.
It turns out running the Mass Effect franchise wasn't just my dream job. It was a lot of other people's. Austin Wintory of Journey composing fame, posted a video of the tracks he would have composed for Mass Effect 5. He did this work entirely on spec - and the comments really give you the feeling. Of which I feel equally: oh what could have been!
And so look. I'm not going to spend this whole issue railing on corporations. Although the problem is clear! But man. What a fucking bummer. And please. And for real. Let me run Mass Effect. I'm begging you.
4. I Wanted Mass Effect But Got This Space Bear Instead
So the real question is, is something like Exodus, a new franchise, what carries the torch for something like Mass Effect? A week after EA closed BioWare, Archetype Entertainment put out 40 minutes of pure gameplay from their Mass Effect inspired game. Which, honestly, kudos:
And someone like me should be so fucking hyped about something like this. And don't get me wrong. Especially after the closing of BioWare, I'm going to fucking try and play this game. I want it to be everything that carries the torch. But there are some things to be worried about.
First, James Ohlen, lead designer on Knights of the Old Republic, stepped down from the company last year. And also this isn't some independent studio. It's Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast. Which. I'm not trying to be a dick here. But like, what... do you really think about high quality, genre-defining games when you think about Hasbro/Wizards? Sure, you think MTG, you think D&D. But new IP action RPG space operas is not probably on the tip of the tongue.
Their main games are Baldur's Gate 3 (only associated through the D&D licensing), Monopoly Go! (also a license) - which lol - sure it makes a fuck ton of money but thoughtful gaming experience it's not, and Magic: The Gathering Arena.
I'd actually trust it more if it were coming from a Sandfall like studio: truly independent but with AAA experience. Designing something they are passionate about. I don't know how to describe it. But you can see it in the straight 40 minute trailer. It feels... generic? It feels like the safest decisions a corporation would make over and over again.
The whole magic of a space action RPG is to test your imagination, feel larger than life. Not be Uncharted in space.
I wanna hear from y'all. Are you guys excited about this? Or am I just a fucking downer?
All that said, Hasbro IS treating Exodus as one of its big two owned video games of 2027 and has told investors the launch WILL impact Wizards' margins next year. So I do need to credit them for actually investing and putting their money where their mouth is. I just wish it didn't feel so space generic.
And I'm sorry. It's hard to get excited about this:
or this:
I mean. I guess there is this space bear:
I tried to get a readable frame of the part where he sticks a space sword into the bear up close - but there's so much motion blur it's incomprehensible. No joke tho, that sequence is actually a better modernization of the chainsaw mechanic from Gears of War than E-Day did it lol.
And look, it does feel like everyone WANTS it to be the next big thing:
I think this is why the skeptic in me is coming out, especially after watching the trailers themselves. You don't see a lot of comments that are like - HOLY SHIT! This looks so fucking amazing! Let's fucking goooooo! They are basically some variation on... oh man, I hope it's good because I need this to be good. Which is not a great starting point.
5. WARDOGS is Doing Nostalgia Better than Xbox
Speaking of the next great franchise. Can it be WARDOGS?
We've talked about WARDOGS a lot already in this newsletter. But WARDOGS is doing a better job at running the Halo nostalgia playbook than XBOX is.
They launched Early Access with a trailer that remade the famous Halo 3 "Believe" ad with a CTA of "PLAY LIKE YOU USED TO. COMING TO CONSOLES IN 2028." Which is nuts, because as Xbox's 25th anniversary is coming up, you don't even see this kind of advertising from them. Bulkhead understands the audience better than Halo and Xbox do. But his is how franchises slowly die. You get large teams of people working on a thing who don't actually love or care about the thing in the same way the original team does. And they don't spend the cycles to actually get to know the passionate fan base. And then you get shit made that feels... empty.
And that's not just me being a unwarranted dick. Check the comments on the trailer, they all fucking read this way:
I mean, literally:
And WARDOGS is for sure going through some turbulence as they move towards launch next year. Season 2 had some bumps when it launched. Bulkhead realized they were wrong and pulled Season 3 forward.
Then Bulkhead capped official servers at 175 ping to keep out "regions that are more prone to cheating," which lead to a bunch of negative reviews from affected players in Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, who were locked out of the servers they played on.
But these don't read as catastrophic failures to me. They read as a studio trying to figure it out and continuing to communicate, clearly, along the way, about the hard tradeoffs they have to make.
This is the thing people don't understand about running truly global live service games. IT'S REALLY FUCKING HARD PEOPLE. It's an insane, impossible task. And so what I see is a studio trying their best to do it and be honest along the way.
I know I'm just screenshotting a review, and go take a look and read the whole thing natively if you can, but THIS is what fandom looks like. This is what passion looks like. This is the kind of thing I'd expect to see on the Exodus trailer if everyone wasn't just held hostage there because there are no other good choices.
6. Millennial-Maxxing
I did want to include healthy counter examples to my point to show that not all franchises are doomed. It is still possible to manage them effectively in a way that speaks to their original fans.
Two of the oldest names in games are coming back very soon: WoW Forever on November 4th and the Ocarina of Time remake on November 5th. Both are legacy IPs and the players for these experiences are excited as fuck for their releases. I have a friend who won't stop asking me if I'm going to play WoW Forever with him. (if you're reading this, I'm still thinking about it). But notice what BOTH these experiences are.
They aren't a gutsy remake or reboot of something. They aren't trying to figure out what's next in the IP. They are straight up nostalgia fuel. And listen. It fucking works.
These games are literally selling you the experience to go back in time and remember the good ol' days before AI bubbles and WWIII.
This comment made me laugh, but this is LITERALLY the strategy of both these releases.
And so look - if you want to just print money, it's not a bad strategy. It does fucking work. This chart tells everything to you about WHY companies do this. But it's not making anything new. Keeping a franchise fresh. Which contributes to the feeling we're all having: what's the next big franchise?
7. The Franchises of the Future
Maybe the reason we don't recognize what franchises are coming next is because they don't look like anything that came before. I actually think the king of modern franchise building today is Hoyoverse.
Genshin Impact. Honkai Star Rail. ZZZ. These are universes that people fall in love with. It also brings us to the latest mega launch, Phantom Blade Zero, from S-GAME in Beijing, which just peaked at 775k players on Steam (putting it at #5 right behind CS2, Dota 2, PUBG, and Wallpaper Engine). And critics and users are giving it some pretty good scores! Plus, its budget was roughly $50m, a tenth of that massive $500M Gears budget.
Massive game popping on Steam doesn't make for a franchise. But it does point out that the games that are lasting are coming less and less from American/European studios and more out of Asia.
One of the reasons that the game is popping for people is that at the heart of the game is a creator with something to say. Notice that in all the Exodus talk, you don't get a core reason or passion. Just, we gotta make a big space game. From the creator's Weibo: "它一方面源自我当年求学时在困苦与迷茫中创作的那部独立游戏；但它也凝聚了我们在能力所及之内所能倾注的一切。" (roughly translated: "On one hand it comes from the indie game I made as a student, in hardship and confusion; on the other it holds everything we were capable of pouring in.")
I refuse to link to an Asmongold video - but this comment covers the rough player sentiment:
And so maybe we are witnessing the rise of new franchises. They just are coming from entirely new places.
That's all for this week. One more example is the slow and steady rise of Deadlock over the last couple years after a rough dip post announcement.
Another one to watch.
This issue probably has some of the most raw takes in it, but I'm curious what you think about the state of modern gaming franchises. Do you think I'm being too pessimistic? Are you excited for Exodus?
Hit reply and let me know.
See you next Sunday.