While Activision devotes 90% of its production toward Guitar Hero titles (“Play Guitar Hero on your car’s GPS!”) EA is busying itself between studio closures and layoffs with preparations for the Sims-like milking of its newest declared mega-franchise, Spore. This Shacknews story reports there are four Spore titles due out this year. They are at least targeting different platforms — the Wii, DS and PC but is there really anything about the Spore universe that warrants a bunch of titles with only a tenuous connection to the original game? The answer is: you aren’t in marketing and your question is dumb.
I’m not terribly bothered by the incoming wave of Spore titles but I do think it reflects lamentably on the growing reliance by game publishers to produce one carefully-cultivated franchise (not game series, “franchises” of “products”) and then squeeze it for all its worth until its eventual collapse forces them to move onto something else (see also: the glut of hunting games and Myst clones in the 1990s that have all but vanished now).
