Another problem for studios that actually do make a hit is that the market then demands more and inevitably developers get burnt out on a franchise. It happened with Epic and Gears of War, it happened with Bungie and Halo, and it's likely to continue to occur.
"It's a financial risk issue. If you're sitting there on a Gears 1 and it made however much money and sold 6 odd million units, and you're like, 'What do we do now? Do we do another one of those, which we'll do so much faster now, because we have a bunch of assets, and we know that game?' So it's not just 'is a Gears 2 more likely to sell than name new IP here?' It's also faster to make it," Capps explained.
"And nobody cares in the market whether it took you, whatever, 100 man years to make Gears 2 or 200 man years. They don't care. It doesn't affect anybody at all. And if I can do it in 100 instead of 200 it's half the opportunity cost. So you could get in a situation where you could make Gears 2 and Gears 3 easily in the time that I could've created Fallout from scratch or whatever. And I think everyone loves to stretch their wings creatively, but at some point, my gosh, why wouldn't you repeat - and you see what happens."
He added, "What would we have gotten if we had not made Gears 2 and 3 and instead made a project that we were thinking about making and didn't do? If we had done that instead, it would have been a different world, maybe one that was not as lucrative, but maybe one we were more proud of. As a production guy, I was really proud of Gears 2 because we did it darn fast and we shipped Gears PC in the middle of it - so I was proud of our execution."
That same problem has carried over in a way to mobile as well. Reflecting on his old colleagues at Chair Entertainment, Capps remarked, "The benefit and curse of the success of Infinity Blade is that it made it very hard for them to do anything other than another Infinity Blade."