| Xxain said: What should SONY do? Can there dead weight IP's and start fresh KILLZONE MAG SOCOM INFAMOUS and maybe LITTLE BIG PLANET MOTORSTORM Need to go!
and in there place IP's created with the 3 elements listed above
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I agree with a lot of what was said - Sony's first-party IPs tend to struggle, relative to those of Nintendo and Microsoft (although MS's lineup isn't particularly strong, either, with the only truly notable title being Halo). But the part I quoted, I think you've gotten slightly wrong.
It's not that Sony needs to get rid of franchises. It's that they need to be willing to let franchises go on hiatus, or at least have longer development times between games. If you look at the king of first-party, Nintendo, you'll see that they have quite a few "weak" franchises - Star Fox, Kirby, Pikmin, Punch Out, F-Zero, Mother/Earthbound, Fire Emblem, etc, etc. These franchises simply don't compare to the Wii series, Mario, Zelda, or Pokemon. But Nintendo still makes them. Why? Because variety is important, and individual games don't actually sell systems on their own.
Take, for instance, Killzone. There has been roughly a new Killzone every 2 years (including the spinoff title). This, in the scheme of things, wouldn't be too bad, if FPS wasn't an overdone genre already. If the franchise became a "once per generation" franchise, instead, it would have enough time to gain incredible new elements to recapture the interests of people who like such games, and with one per generation, it would become a real treat.
With the extra time, they can have the game being built on the backburner, while putting more effort into other titles. This opens up room for new IPs of a variety of sorts.
One thing Sony is missing is a mascot - a first-party character that they can use to represent the company, a character that is mainstream. None of their character-driven franchises are strong enough, at this point, with their strongest-performing game with a character even remotely resembling a mascot being Uncharted, at less than 5 million. Nintendo has Mario and Link (not to mention Samus, Wario, Yoshi, Donkey Kong... the list goes on), Sega has Sonic, Capcom has Mega Man and Ryu (and a few select others), Microsoft has Master Chief. Sony had Crash, but Crash was a third-party character, and has since shown up on other systems. Nathan Drake is the best that Sony can do at the moment, and he's just not that much of a mascot.
With a mascot, you can do more than just one type of game. A mascot franchise can be expanded into many subfranchises, all of which act in a convergent manner to further capture the interest of the mainstream. Mario is in many games... but people don't tire of him, because each type of game only happens occasionally. There's one Mario Kart per generation (well, two, counting portable generations separately), there's one 2D Mario per generation (when Nintendo does the right thing), etc. In a rare situation, you see a second one, as with Galaxy 2, but that happened because they had too many ideas, and couldn't fit them all into one game within the time period available.
And the mascot titles can undergo much more stringent quality control. If everyone knows that a game with your mascot in it will be good, then they're more likely to buy games with your mascot in it. Nintendo does this with Mario, making sure that all Mario titles live up to a higher standard (the standard is very high - consider that people considered Super Mario Sunshine a "weak" Mario title, when they would have called it an exceptionally good title in any other franchise).
Beyond such a mascot series, it's also important to try to diversify without pigeonholing. Nintendo doesn't make a game going "now, who are we going to target with this game". Compare with, say, Ape Escape, a game clearly aimed at children. Sony targets to demographics, when they should be trying to broaden interest. Why not make an FPS that's more colourful, fun, and easily played at parties? I could definitely see a game with Move where one player controls movement, yet all four players can shoot? It could be a colourful game where you're fighting off little green aliens, with plenty of bright colours and funny events, and the winner is the person who gets the high score (with funny events giving more points - shoot the alien on the swing, and watch him go flying into the air, for instance, or ricochet a shot off a can and into an alien's arse). Think the on-rails FPS mode of early Rabbids games, but more zany, more controllable, and tweaked to suit parties.
Look again at Sony's lineup of IPs. Most of them are "Mature" (the gaming sense, not in terms of actual maturity), most of them are dark, many of them are single-player only, and the ones that aren't tend to either be "frag-fests" or minigame collections aimed at children. It just isn't mainstream.
Sony could avoid the problems with this using third-party support in previous generations. However, Microsoft's strength this generation, combined with Nintendo's increasing efforts to appeal to third parties, mean that Sony can't rely on that any more. They need to establish their own breadth of IPs, where right now they only have depth of IPs.
