FF VII is a 10 million seller

Both Gears of War have sold more than 5 mill, so that gives MS two franchises. 

I think the market their games have currently appealed to aren't big enough.

Usually, 5-7 million selling games reach what TheSource calls "critical mass", and start hitting system seller territory.

i hope u mean halo and gears as 2 franchises and not gears 1 and gears 2 seperately....cuz that is one frachise two games in the franchise....

You my friend have one the Common Sense post of the day. Good Job! I couldn't have said it better myself.

Sony power has always been the 3rd party. Look at the PS2 with the top selling games. All being games from the GTA series. Which is not a bad thing, but 1st Party games move hardware because the are exclusive. You can't get them anywhere, but that system. Since Sony has no break away 1st party must have. They are now in a battle with the 360 over 3rd party games. Something they are currently losing badly. Nintendo has proven you can move hardware and stay in the hardware game. On 1st party games alone. Sony will continue to have problems. Untill they get that most have multi million seller. Will MAG be it? What about GOW3. History says no since that series games have sold in the 3 to 4 million range. We will have to see.

Ok mr smartie pants, name one game they have released thus far which deserves to have sold 5M+ copies? the PS3 has sold 32M units, so therefore a game would have to be bought by almost 16% of the present userbase to reach that level of sales.

They've released games which appeals greatly to smaller segments of their userbase. For example they have released shooters with no local multiplayer when every single 5M+ selling shooter has had this feature! Gears of War, Call of Duty and Halo 3 are your 3 5M selling shooters and they have all had this feature. Even Gran Turismo has had this feature. Resistance 2s sales went down compared to the first and they REMOVED this feature.

Naughty Dog: "ohhh we could have had local play but we wanted better grafix" Developers who leave out key features to focus on visuals DONT deserve to sell 5M.

GT5 Easy. And Uncharted 2 will get there. And maybe LBP if it keeps selling.

Im not talking a subjective 'deserved' but in terms of an objective metric. Does a game do X Y and Z to increase its appeal and broaden its audience. X could be features, Y could be advertising and Z could be potential audience size. Its easy to say that any game which dominates its sub niche 'deserves' to sell 5M copies but from an objective standpoint if it lacks the ability to bring in people who aren't keen on the genre it won't make it by this mark.

Halo 3 got a wide / excellent feature set, it had excellent advertising and shooters are a large audience so therefore it sold extremely well because it was a great game and because it hit all the marks.

Uncharted 2 has a narrower feature set with no coop, had excellent but more limited advertising and the sub genre it was in was not as large and it didn't manage to bring in as many people from outside the genre inspite of being a great game also.

There's no need to debate about what counts and what doesn't count. Since this thread is based on my posts and my posts alone to the thread starter I will simply define what counts and doesn't count. If They published it, it counts. If they didn't publish it, it doesn't count. If Epic takes Gears 3 elsewhere and a third party publishes it then 1 & 2 count but 3 doesn't. 

I wish I could define it as any games that the console manufacturer decides to invest substantial capital in but because we don't know about under handing cash that may flow from MS or Sony to third party publishers it will simply be games that they themselves publish. Which means we have complete knowledge that they are willing or were willing to take a risk and back that game. MGS4 doesn't count. Gears 1 & 2 count. FFVII counts as a game, but since it's the only one Sony published it doesn't count as a franchise. 

I completely agree. However CGI is right in that it is subjective but the way you have broken it down makes sense and very hard to argue with. I do agree that games like Uncharted have lacked certain things that would make it more commercial friendly but to say it doesn't deserve to sell 5 million is completely subjective. The game may infect reach 5 million, but it definitely could have done more to reach a higher sales status but instead Naughty Dog/Sony decided not to do them while Bungie/MS has done them.