Talk:List of video game franchises

Usage
COPY OF OLD TEXT ON WIKI, BELONGS HERE BETTER:

Video game franchises grouped by both genre and alphabetic order.

All information is taken directly from the Wiki article about each video game franchise or from Wiki articles about individual games in a franchise. This page should NOT contain new information that requires a reference.

In each table


 * The "Title" value should link to a Wiki article about the franchise, NOT to a Wiki article about an individual game.

Veniks (talk) 23:29, 30 September 2012 (UTC)
 * The "Platforms" value shows a union of platforms for all games in a franchise. The number in parentheses beside each platform indicates the number of games in the franchise that run on the platform.

Sub-franchises
Let's not add in sub-franchises to this article. It does nothing but bloat the article without adding anything useful. For instance, Mega Man covers the original series as well as X, Zero, EXE, etc. perfectly fine; we don't need to go into more detail on it. -- LGagnon 20:44, August 1, 2005 (UTC) But, what if some one does'nt know about the different games in a franchise. It is important to make this information readily available.-- User talk:ALAN1992 —Preceding undated comment added 17:51, 20 June 2010 (UTC).

Show number of installments in list
Wouldn't it be nice to show the number of installments in the list? Would be a nice way for researchers to get a quick idea of which ones are the more extensive franchises. I'll happily do the work, but of course this will need to be kept up to date. -- 195.80.238.2


 * And that is why we shouldn't do so. It's too much work with too little gain. The individual articles can keep track of this info better than this one can. -- LGagnon 20:54, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

ToeJam and Earl
Shouldn't this count —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.90.196.72 (talk) 14:40, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

REFORMAT!!!
By itself, this Wiki article has minimal information value. In fact, it provides basically the same information as "Category:Video_game_franchises".

If there's no serious dissent after a month, I will start to reformat this article as follows:

ProResearcher (talk) 12:59, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Group the video games by genre
 * Within each genre, present the franchises in a Wiki table

No comments after two weeks, so I will modify the article to show a preview of its new format during the transition phase.

Feel free to write your comments here on the "Discussion" page. Please do not nitpick! ProResearcher (talk) 07:40, 27 August 2011 (UTC)


 * Checking the article history, ProResearcher abandoned this project immediately after starting it, and in 2012 and 2013 other editors reverted his inappropriate sandbox-style version of the article. But though this reformat is dead, I'll still point out a couple bedrock problems with it. First, categorizing video game franchises by genre runs into problems beyond those faced when categorizing individual games, since franchises often have games in different genres. Second, most of the table information is not particularly useful and too vulnerable to going out of date (e.g. "number of games", "year of last game"). That said, I can't think of any better way of reformatting the article, which brings us back to your original point: This article is redundant to Category: Video game franchises. I think the AfD treatment may be in order.--Martin IIIa (talk) 14:25, 12 September 2016 (UTC)


 * This article has only a little more merit than the category, given that some franchises are rather diffused to its subcategories and cannot be found in the main category. The category will always be up to date and does as good job as current state of the article. One thing though, I don't understand why is every franchise referenced with a random review webpage? --Vipz (talk) 00:19, 27 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Just following WP:V - everything on Wikipedia needs to be sourced. It's just verifying that ever entry is an actual series/franchise. (There are a surprising number of editors who erroneously add one-off games to "series" lists.) Sergecross73   msg me  00:49, 27 May 2021 (UTC)

Inclusion criteria
It looks like this will probably survive its WP:AFD, so I figured I'd start a discussion on inclusion criteria. Right off the bat, I'm going to remove any game that is just a single game and not an actual series/franchise. Beyond that, should there be any stricter restrictions with including entries on here? Any input? Sergecross73  msg me  12:38, 29 March 2018 (UTC)
 * The lead made a statement that the list didn't feature series that were primarily from another media format (for example James Bond) or sports games (Fifa, Madden, etc) I support these inclusion criteria as well. Sergecross73   msg me  12:59, 29 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Another thought - we could also tie inclusion to whether or not a reliable source directly calls it a "franchise" or "series". For example, if you just Google something like "Sonic the Hedgehog franchise", you quickly find a a reliable source like this that calls it a franchise. Or, alternative, if you search for something more broad like "Top Video Game Franchises", you come up with this IGN source, which will provide sources for 25 different entries. I figure I'll probably start adding sources regardless, but as it goes farther, it could be tied to inclusion... Sergecross73   msg me  13:03, 30 March 2018 (UTC)

Off of my preliminary work on the article, I'm favoring the inclusion criteria of: Honestly, I don't see an issue with including sports or other licenses as long as there's a source directly calling it a franchise/series. Most sources I'm seeing don't make that distinction - many sources have pointed out things like FIFA or Madden. Sergecross73  msg me  23:43, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
 * 1) Requiring more than one game entry in existence.
 * 2) Requiring a reliable source (per WP:VG/S) directly stating that it's a franchise or series.

Spin-off series
How do we want to handle sub/spin-off series? Right now, Fatal Fury is listed as a sub-set of The King of Fighters, while Persona is listed separately from Megami Tensei (and Majin Tensei, Megami Tensei Gaiden: Last Bible and Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Children aren't listed at all despite also being Megami Tensei sub-series and having articles of their own). Additionally, do we want to limit sub-series to those with separate articles? Because if not, we'll be looking at a lot of additional ones - just to continue with Megaten, we'd otherwise have to add Shin Megami Tensei, Devil Summoner and Devil Survivor.--Alexandra IDVtalk 14:08, 3 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Yeah, for a lot of them, I've been trimming out the little subseries - the list is already long (as was much longer), and I've been trying to trim it down rather than balloon it out further. And I think the big umbrella series generally captures the franchise just fine. But there's some I wasn't quite sure how to handle. For example, I think Persona is worth mentioning on its own, as the mainstream recognizes it as a separate thing far more than it does all the other smaller Megaten games. Same with some of the individual entries of the Tom Clancy's game series - it seems like if we just list Tom Clancy, there's going to be a bunch of people re-adding Splinter Cell because they see it as a separate entity, which I can totally see, comparing it to something like The Division. Same with some of the Mario subseries games. But I haven't figure out quite where to draw the line or how to articulate that yet. So I was just working on trimming non-franchises and sourcing franchises for now. (I'm not familiar with the King of Fighters series, actually, so that's still there because I hadn't done the research to figure out how it relates to the other series. It's still there strictly because of my unfamiliarity with it.) Sergecross73   msg me  14:28, 3 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Yeah, that makes sense. I would probably include at least Devil Children, since it was a big deal back in the day in Japan, with plenty of games and two long-running anime series, but I think it's completely fair to skip Majin Tensei and Gaiden. And yeah, I'm pretty unfamiliar with King of Fighters myself, hah... I just happened to notice it as I scrolled through the page.--Alexandra IDVtalk 14:42, 3 April 2018 (UTC)

Licensed franchises
I was originally gonna just do this myself, but I'd think community input would be a more suitable option. Honestly, I don't see an issue with including licensed franchises, such as those based on films, television series or sports teams. If reliable sources call it a franchise, and there's enough entries to warrant it, I'd say their inclusion to the list would be justified. Examples include FIFA, Madden, James Bond, Spongebob Squarepants and Star Wars Battlefront - all of these are notable, and I've got reliable sources for each of these handy. Namcokid47 (talk) 18:16, 29 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Yeah, that was something I was contemplating when I was cleaning up the article in 2018 as well. (I even openly mused about it here.) I don't see any issue with licensed entries either. Fifa, Madden, and James Bond are some of the most prominent video game franchises in existence. I see no reason not to include them. I think the exclusion was just a remnant of the pre-2018 garbage status it was in that lead to it being nominated for deletion, so there's no particular reason to retain anything from that... Sergecross73   msg me  18:47, 29 May 2019 (UTC)
 * I agree, considering how many of them sold millions of units total, as well as being somewhat important historically. Okay, I'll start adding some of them soon. Namcokid47 (talk) 18:50, 29 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Sounds good. And thanks for taking this project over. Sergecross73   msg me  18:56, 29 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Do any type of licneced media count? TV shows (Animation and Live-action), Movies (Live-Action and Animation), boardgames, RPGs (the none video ones: World of Darkness is probably a good example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Darkness#Now_in_print) and Books DoctorHver (talk) 04:44, 8 August 2019 (UTC)

Sources and verification failures
A reminder - the name of this articles is "list of video game franchises". We need to be following WP:V, so to include an item on the list, you need a reliable source that directly refers to it as a franchise or series. A source that merely mention a single game doesn't cut it. Sergecross73  msg me  12:12, 18 December 2023 (UTC)