The Mario "games" aren't really milked though are they? The character is milked and used to sell games from a variety of genres, but each of those games has very differently gameplay elements.

OT: Call of Duty is getting there. People keep buying it at the moment, but it's getting to the point where they just keep adding minor gimmicks to differentiate the yearly iterations. Perhaps MW3 can add something new to the mix, but the question of "How to top last year's iteration?" is only going to get harder to answer.

The difference is, some series have seen an obvious drop off in sales due to their milking, such as Final Fantasy and Tales.  When you make more games than meet demand, its obvious your sales will go down.  And as much as some people may claim to be Final Fantasy fans, I've never heard of one that buys every FF game that comes out.  How could you, when SE releases 10-12 new FF games a year?  And no one is going to buy 5 copies of FFIV yet SE released another port of it just recently, after already releasing 2 ports, a remake and two sequel games this gen alone.

The problem is, a lot of people in this thread are mistaking what 'milking' really is.  Come on really, Assassins Creed?  There's been 3 main games over the last 4 years.  And while that may spell disaster for some series, the games are still some of the best selling and highest rated games this gen.  Clearly they have a formula down for making the games both quickly and content filled.  And if that's the case, what's the problem?  Its not like they're releasing ports of the previous games or releasing 10 quickly made sequels.  In short, as long as the quality stays high, there's no problem.

You could just as easily call the Metroid series 'over-milked' back when the Prime games, Metroid Fusion and Metroid Zero Mission all came out in a 4 year span.  Or Prince of Persia.  Yet those series aren't critisized.

Also sports titles usually go through seasons, so it makes sense to release an update with a new roster, every year for it.  When a company releases more than one title a year of a brand, that is milking it, in my opinion.  

As for why they do it?  Well, it is money.  If they can get money for sales, they will.  This happens all over with game genres to.  I saw Magic: The Gathering gave birth to a flood of Collectable Card Games.  Now, you see "Deck building games" becoming a rage.  Will see how it pans out.  But markets tend to have profitable trends exploited, like with Tower Defense games.

Also, doesn't the term "milking" come from the term "cash cow"?  You milk a cash cow to get milk, and more coin.  Things get overmilked when they put out too many titles that differ by not enough.  Unless I see something new that compels me to get Modern Warfare 3 (Black Ops had this), I feel NO reason to get MW3.  The story?  Who here is expecting a great story out of Modern Warfare?  Can they promise getting back to the first Modern Warfare?  I have a hard time seeing that, as World War III got out of the bag.  I say they add an alien invasion to the mix, just to push things into the full off the rails mode.

If peopel keep buying them then they are goin to keep making them as quickly as possible. Most (not all) of them only care about money, and how much they can get.

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

well ofcourse pokemon and cod the 2 top selling mascots

pokemon is nintendo's cash cow

while cod is a cash cow for n00bs like me who like messing around online and like 85% of us we skip the single player and play multiplayer

but its really the name if nintendo made a game call nintendo sportz zone on ds it would sell around 400k but if you called it pokemon sportz zone it would sell around 2mill its the name not the game guys!!

Millions of people?

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

modern warfare is on a 2 year cycle and id rather have it that way instead of buying map packs.

if it went onto a 3 or 4 year cycle, other developers would make a clone of it and take activisions market share.

so the question is why would activision give up like 25m sales per call of duty to a competitor when they can have it for themselves?

if i was running activision i sure wouldnt let the opportunity go....but i would make sure all the cheaters got permanently banned.

Over-milking in reality is different to the definition we gamers have of an over-milked franchise. We see it as there simply being lots of games released in a particular franchise, so we'll scream that healthy franchises like Mario, EA's sport games, COD, and many others are over-milked because there are constant releases, when the actual definition would be something else entirely.

It's a situation where there's nothing left to milk, where you've worn the poor cow or whatever animal it is out and milked it dry. If we apply that definition, then I can only think of Guitar Hero and the Tony Hawk games.

They've been pumped out so much and so regularly that nothing else can be sustained.

Because they know it will sell even if it's bad (or similar to the old games).