I was thinking about this when I replied to this topic as well earlier.
If the various companies suddenly started fully relying on a single formula blockbuster, like Call of Duty, without releasing anything else, wouldn't the games industry basically crash?
It works as long as a couple of franchises do it, but there needs to be a steady flow of some sort of variety and content.
Call of Duty is a series of games that has been going on for over a decade, with several hits, great marketing and such behind them. (And, of course, 60 FPS.)
Yet people think they can come in with a second entry, or a third entry into a relatively new series, and reach more than half of the people even?
The solution isn't to make it more broad and generic. Or spend more money on marketing or development (BF 3 apparently spent 150 million dollars on marketing.). The solution is to make a new, great game with a reasonable budget, with team of people who are fully committed. Then build off it.
Also, I think it's quite important to stay somewhat true to the prior games, and not wander too far off. By going in a completely different direction, and streamlining the gameplay, you will most likely annoy fans of the prior games -- which is understandable, since it's effectively saying;
"Thanks for your money, but since we probably already have you now, we don't care as much about what you're interested in, we're going to try and appeal to other peoples interests."
After maintaining a fanbase for several years by releasing several good games that are somewhat similar (But still needs to keep gameplay and such fresh.), only then is it possible to reliably hit somewhere close to CoD numbers, I think.
But, I also think a decent portion of the CoD playerbase are people who generally don't play games, and just buy the new CoD entries. They've gotten used to it.
