Sony has been in the console business for 15 year. 

They've created 3 amazing consoles, two of them being amazingly popular and one the best selling home console in the world. They own the most amazing developers, I believe today Sony is only second to Nintendo in  quality when it comes to first party titles. They created dozens franchises, some of them more popular than others yet only one of them - Gran Turismo, has been extremely popular and with Gran Turismo 5 releasing soon, we will see if the franchise is still popular as it was before.

I'm trying to think why, in 15 years, they couldn't make at least one extremely popular franchise among the dozens they've created? Even back in the PS2 era, Sony created some of the best titles on the system, but they still weren't crazy popular

Titles that are critically acclaimed - Uncharted 2, God of War 3, Killzone 2 - Why do they fail to reach their sales potential? It obvious the potential is there

Take Uncharted 2 for example. It the most critically acclaimed of the bunch, it has multiplayer, co-op and I can't take of a game that is more easy to market - yet it failed to make an impact and dropped of the NPD for good after one month of sales which weren't extremely good anyway

Why do titles like Gears of War (for some reason the eastiest title to compare to Uncharted) do so much better?

Why do titles like Killzone 2 which had a huge amount of hype and belongs to the most popular genre on consoles today failed to sell the millions everyone thought it will?

It an interesting topic I think we should discuss

*looks at username*

One word

Marketing

I would say the ps3 userbase is to blame as much as the marketing by sony.

Guess their two jobs didn't work out! :P

because they dont make things mainstream, because they have lots of first party titles hence lots of competition, because they dont have and dont want a flag ship title, and because 3 franchises dont define the ps3 experience. 

Well Sony has generally always been about variety more than mastheads. Plus, creating a mega-franchise is largely conditional (apart from advertising; that part's pretty cut and dry), and amounts to luck sometimes.

Sony Brand is built off of Thrid party titles unlike Nintendo and MS, which is why IP's like Final Fantasy, Tekken, and Metel Gear are Playstaiony than SONY's own IP. It also hurts that SONY usaually cans its IP every GEN thus stopping popularity growth* but there learning the value of 1st party this gen so im sure that will end*

When you buy Nintendo Consoles you youdo so for primarily NIntendo games

XBOX has the the biggest 1st and third party shooters and just shooters in general

Sony doesnt have any defining games or genres, and its fanbase relies stiill on 3rd party games

Then the Otakus on SONY consoles dont help either..

Sony doesn't have the slightest idea, and they don't know how to market their games. But Sony's audience also seems to be more varied so it's much more difficult to create a "mega franchise". Personally I'm a bit surprised Gran Turismo is so big, I can't fully understand it. But I'm also not a car person so that could explain a bit.

/thread :P

imo, sony is looking for the best devs to make their big franchises...now they know that Naughty Dog, Sony Santa Monica, PD, Media Molecule, and Guerrilla Games are their safe bets to make great games with critical acclaim to advertise their games...i don't know, imo, this gen has been nothing more but a prototype for sony.

There's a lot of truth to this.

I agree on KZ2, Uncharted and especially Lil Big Planet.

But Heavy Rain was not supposed to be big to begin with lol. It did extremely well for what it is and Sony is lucky to have Qauntic Dreams.