Annual Sequels Harm Creativity, LucasArts Director Believes

LucasArts creative director Clint Hocking shared his views on the annual sequels seen in quite a few big franchises nowadays, including Call of Duty, and his belief that it ends up harming the creative process of the respective studios by having to crank out a new title year-in year-out.

Yearly installments of big sports franchises, like Madden, FIFA or NBA 2K aren't new, but more and more regular series, chief among which being Call of Duty, are following the trend, dragging the whole industry along with it because of their massive profits.

Hocking doesn't want more publishers to follow this trend, however, as forcing developers to churn out a new game each year is a recipe for creative disaster, even if sales might warrant the investment at first.

"You may sell lots of copies of two or three sequels," Hocking said in an opinion piece for Edge magazine. "But you will bore the audience very quickly and will have likely already spent all your money on the fourth sequel before realizing the audience is tired of the game and won’t buy it at all."

"It might generate easy revenue, but the long-term costs to the creative well-being of our workforce and the risk it places on our pipeline and workflow development, and on the skills we nurture and develop and will then need to leverage in making future games and (hopefully) new brands and franchises, should not be underestimated," he adds.

While sequels are pretty much here to stay, especially during crowded holiday seasons, quite a few companies have pledged to invest in all-new IPs in order to keep the industry from stagnating or falling back on tried and true properties.

Another solution, however, is to follow Activision's Call of Duty strategy, which has multiple studios working on the series and alternating releases to allow them a two-year development cycle.