Over-milked franchises: Why do publishers do it?

[richardhutnik]

Mr Puggsly said:

richardhutnik said:

pezus said:

I think it's harder to run story-based games into the ground (AC, even CoD) than music games and sports games. 

How many people get into Call of Duty for the stories or the characters involved?

Millions of people?

Black Ops inparticular had a great story in my opinion. The CoD franchise has really evolved in that regard since CoD4.

Millions of people buy the game.  But how many for the single player experience?  If Call of Duty were single player only, how many people would buy it?