Remember, you can not milk a franchise. You can only milk THE FANS. Milking is not treating the franchise like a milk cow, it is treating THE FANS like milk cows.
The great problem is not that some franchise is ruined, the problem is that THE FAN gets ripped off. The ruination of the franchise is an after effect of the fans being pissed.
It is looking to get more money out of each fan, rather than increasing the number of fans. You can only increase the number of fans by making a product that more people like. That's hard to do. But you can also make more money by finding "new business models" that amount to charging existing fans more for the same thing. In the short term only, this is much easier.
"[Our former customers] are unable to find software which they WANT to play."
"The way to solve this problem lies in how to communicate what kind of games [they CAN play]."
Satoru Iwata, Nintendo President. Only slightly paraphrased.
