You're thinking of a way too limited definition of franchise, I was more thinking of something like Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest.

I'm considered by many to be anti-Playstation (which I laugh at because there isn't a PlayStation console I didn't buy and support).  I made a metacritic prediction thread for this game and I predicted an 85%.  It got so many low predictions and such negative buzz that I actually considered canceling my pre-order!  Glad to see the game is getting good reviews.  I tend to buy what I want but I admit, I was getting nervous!

It's funny to see people flip flop, though.

I find it so strange that Ready at Dawn, a company who previously worked on some stellar PSP games, managed to make an AAA-dud on PS4, yet Supermassive Games, who previously worked on shovelware and family stuff, have managed to make a critically well-received game (remains to be seen how it will sell).

Just goes to show that you never really can tell how a team is going to do once they're given some budget. Makes me wonder what other devs out there are being held back by low budgets.

Then it's already part of the broad Heavy Rain franchise.

If sales are good why not?

That's like saying every FPS is part of the broad Doom franchise.

People said the same thing about Heavy Rain. Hell, even the developers only thought it would sell 300k. It went on to sell over 2 million.

Knowing the history of the PS fanbase, and with the good reviews coming in, I'm starting to think this game will be "bigger" than what I originally thought. I've never heard of Supermassive before this game, so I thought this was just gonna be some obscure game that would get lost in the wind. But, like I said, same thing happened with Heavy Rain (a very similar game) and it blew up. 

I don't have any kind of prediction on what this game will sell, and I'm afraid to do so, for fear of looking dumb in hindsight. I compare it to Heavy Rain because the mechanics of the game are similar, and if a game like that can come out of left field and sell over 2 million, then I don't want to say a game like Until Dawn will "only sell" X amount of units. But, on the flip side, as stated above, HR was only expected to sell 300k, so, then, if Until Dawn sells something like that, will that be called "underperforming"?

Hopefully it at least sells a million copies. Probably gonna be slow but it'll get there once people start playing it and posting let's plays on Youtube. If it ever becomes a franchise then I don't think they can stick with the same cheesy campy interactive horror movie anymore. Maybe next time they should try doing a serious horror movie with serious scares or play with all the various genere of horror films. They can become the horror version of Quantic Dream although I doubt Supermassive is going to limit themselves like that lol.

Aren't they all?^^

Well not really, don't you think? :D