[dahart]

That is a great story, and should be an inspiration to aspiring gave devs. As you can clearly see in the thread, I did not bring up CoD. Two comments above me were discussing it. I was just pointing out that it’s now a huge franchise. All the franchises, large and small, have cycled through many, many programmers and artists and designers. It does not disrespect your friend to point out that there are multiple studios he didn’t start that are now developing CoD, or to point out that it has been ported to so many platforms that there has been a metric ton of unsexy porting work alongside the original content work. Having worked on both game and movie franchises, I can safely say that there’s less room for individual input. Not none, just less. I’ve witnessed whole studios (both in games and films) push and push to work on an original non-franchise production, because everyone knew it’d be more fun and felt less like being a cog. The fact that your friend made a wildly successful franchise is absolutely great for him, and for his business, but you can’t claim that it’s creatively great for everyone else involved, even if it does support them financially.