Still waiting for Halo 3 to outsell GT 3 or GT 4. (Sony has shipped well over 10 million of GT4. It's undertracked here)

you don't buy franchises, you buy studioes.... stuff like GoW doesn't sell more than 3M copies (if you count all full price that is a max retail of 200M... but substract HD dev costs, retailer margin, sales at lower price points, manufacturing.... and you'll only get 100M). Why would anyone be interested in buying it when they can do a clone they have total freedom over??? especially since the story is supposed to be finished with the trilogy no?

Even GT has little value (but year it does have some brand name appeal).... it's interest is the meticulous approach of the dev team, without that, you don't have anything really. MS and nint might as well do their own racer (Forza? MK? both are already strong)

and on....and on...

you buy GT for the dev team... not the name, and this fanchise has nothing else than the name really.... any car sim can have 500 greatly rendered real cars in it...

Halo has a universe, a hero...it can be only done with the franchise.

Ya and that value is worthless to anyone else so its value on the open market is miniscule.

GT4 shipped 10.06 million, so it won't be long at all before Halo passes it. A franchise is only as good as it is right now though, GT5 isn't going to sell that much.

Sony has a horrible history of building franchises. I remember when Spyro and Crash were huge franchises and Sony looked like they had things under wraps. Then outta know where they sell both franchises to Vivendi and start all over with Ratchet&Clank, Jak&Daxter. Then Sony's newer franchises God Of War, LittleBigPlanet and of course Ratchet&Clank , Jak&Daxter aren't nearly as popular as competitors franchises.

If Sony had held onto Crash/Spyro and maintained their quality both franchises would be doing alot better today. Not to mention Sony would have a far more lucrative base. But today Sony only has Gran Turismo as far as developed franchises go.So Sony selling off its properties wouldn't really earn them squat. First Nintendo would never pick up a Sony property, it wouldn't happen, they have to many high quality properties of their own no need to go out of their way to buy a mediocre property from Sony. Microsoft might show interest in God Of War maybe even GT but again I'm not even sure Microsoft would go out of their way to purchase any Sony property. The most likely buyers for a Sony property would be Activision Blizzard , EAGames , UbiSoft etc...etc.. maybe a dying publisher like THQ or Midway or maybe Atari. But in the end Sony would never get more then 50 mill for even GT. So billions is far out of the question.

If Sony stepped out of the console market, I could see them becoming a very big third party publisher. Shifting their focus from hardware support to building franchises and etching a name for themselves on Nintendo and Microsoft's platforms. Sony's franchises may not be worth much now but if they appeared on multiple formats they would likely increase in value.

But more likely Sony is just going threw a GameCube. Nintendo made GameCube it was a great format but got little love it bombed really harshly. But Nintendo got back on the horse and released Wii. I don't see Sony abandoning the hardware market to neither competitor Nintendo or Microsoft anytime soon. I think in order for Sony to leave they would have to bomb PS4 and then again with PS5 before finally bowing out. Sony is one of the largest if not the largest monopolies on earth and they are going to be really stubborn in face of defeate.

Well, since they'll probably be dropping out soon, that may very well be what they decide to do with their franchises.

Here's a non complete list of franchises Sony owns from wiki

Right now Sony's franchises are worth nothing to them, since they are losing money on their games business. If the PS3 and its games didn't exist Sony would be in a better financial position.

Why would any publisher buy Sony's franchises (or Sony just become a software-only company in the games business) if it costs more money to develop a game in those franchises than the revenue earned from the game sales?

How on earth are these franchises worth billions....?