A(nother Dumb) Theory as to Why VALVe haven't mentioned anything of a Half-Life 3

Yes, I know, the internet is awash with about fifty gazillion theories as to why Valve haven't mentioned anything regarding "Half-Life 2: Episode 3" or "Half-Life 3", but the other day, whilst playing back through Portal 2 for the fourteenth time, something occurred to me that hadn't before.

Valve have a very distinct style in their games. Okay, sure, they're all just first person shooters, what's distinct about that, right? I mean, whilst franchises like "Call of Duty" have forgotten what makes a game a game and have just started churning out sequels like there's no tommorow are clearly doing it all for the money, the titles released by Valve still keep up with the quality of being completely state-of-the-art, at least in terms of the Source Physics engine, as well as being designed so that the gameplay is fun, even to play multiple times over, (or, in the case of Team Fortress 2, keep playing at all), and, most notably, they keep the storylines deep and engrossing; the main reason most of us want to see a finale to the Half-Life series is to find out whether or not Earth will be liberated from the Combine, who the G-Man is, and what the flipping heck the Vortigaunts are supposed to be rambling on about when they mention nonsense like "The Vortessence" or whatever it is they're trying to say. I mean, there's little more iconic in the gaming industry than the Black Mesa logo, a lambda symbol, or even just a crowbar. The original Half-Life is said to have revoloutionised gaming by being "realistic", in as much as weapons, health and ammunition were found lying on tables or in cabinets, rather than as spinning icons in the middle of the room. These days, that sounds fairly basic, but at the time, it hadn't really been done before.  This, amongst other things the Half-Life franchise have brought to us gives the franchise a lot of reputation in the industry, and Valve know it. The problem is, in recent years, overcooked franchises like "Call of Duty" have been selling more and more, whilst games with proper storylines or ingenuitive gameplay have been cast into the shadows........ except Valve games.  But I think that Valve are afraid that if they release Half-Life 3, then everyone will stop paying attention to them, and so don't bother even mentioning it, in the hopes that everyone will stick around simply in the hope that a continuation to Half-Life will be mentioned, and that when it isn't, they'll buy Valve's other games so that they have something new to play in the meantime between then and the announcement of the next Half-Life game... which if this theory is correct, won't be announced.

So, to summarize for those of you who were daunted by the big paragraph above and scrolled straight to the bottom, Valve are leaving a popular series unfinished, simply to make sure their eager fans keep listening to them and keep buying their stuff in the fear that if they do finish that series, people won't care about them anymore.

Why are franchises important to film producers and audiences?

So recently, I found myself going through some exam questions in preparation for my upcoming exams.  One of the questions for the Film Studies exam was a question about franchises being important to the film industry and blah blah blah.  I decided this was as good a time as any to start complaining about everything even remotely connected to the idea of movie franchises, this was my answer:

Film franchises are important to audiences because they provide a sense of familiarity in characters and storyline.  Audiences will keep paying to see new instalments of franchises they enjoy about characters they like.  They will be eager to keep going back to find out what happens to those characters and how they develop, although, in the case of an adapted property, a lot of people will see the film because they are interested to see how the franchise has made the jump from it’s original format to the big screen.

This means that film franchises become very important for producers and production companies, who, more often than not are making the franchise for the sole purpose of PROFIT!

The majority of major film franchises consist of adapted properties, as producers can pick out the franchises that are already popular, they can almost guarantee themselves a massive income from the pre-existing fanbase.

But franchises can often cause people to start using the term “remake”, usually to varying degrees of inaccuracy.  If two films are made of the same property, it’s less a remake that someone else’s adaption, for instance, a lot of people consider the American “Let Me In” to be a remake of the Swedish “Let the Right One In”, whereas, in actual fact, both are an adaption of a novel; and in any case, the Swedish version was released in 2008, and the American version in 2010, which means the American one would probably have already been in early stages of pre-production when the Swedish version was released, and one can hardly remake something they haven’t seen yet.

Similarly, Tim Burton’s upcoming “Dark Shadows” is being accused of being a remake, even though the property it’s based on was a TV series! That would be like saying “The Simpsons Movie” was a remake, but it’s just not, it’s essentially a feature length episode of a series.  So “Dark Shadows” might not have any of the original cast, but that’s because the TV series was syndicated several decades ago, and now all of the original cast are either too old or too dead to play their characters.

Something can only logically be classified as a remake if it’s a new version of something that started out as an original screenplay, not if it’s just  a(nother)  adaption of a property.

My point being that franchises are as much of a danger to producers as they are a monetary opportunity, as they’re likely to be wrongly accused of making  remakes, which for some reason are often considered in a rather derogatory manner.

Producers tend to see franchises as important, because they’ll look at some other franchises like “Harry Potter” or “Star Wars” and decide that they also want to start a franchise that could earn billions.  And it’s  initially a very good idea, and in some cases, like “Harry Potter” it will work enough to make approximately 6.3 billion dollars, and in cases like these, audiences will appreciate that adaption that’s been done; but in other cases, like anything that has the name Tim Burton associated with it, audiences will just make accusations of it being a “remake” and that the producers are “too lazy to do anything original”, so it may seem more sensible to make a franchise out of original characters, but then of course, the producer is in danger of catching ‘George Lucas Syndrome’ and just re-releasing the same old films time and time again, but each time it will have “changed” slightly, like having a slightly different sound design, or be in 3D.

All in all, whilst franchises seem like a profitable idea, the producers seem to be in danger of ruining their careers, and the audiences aren’t that safe either, given that most of them  can’t seem to tell the difference between remakes and adapted properties, which, in a world where most films are either of those things,  it really is something that more if them ought to have a better ability to distinguish between.

So: how important are franchises to producers and audiences? I’d say very important, as the way things are at the moment, it seems that franchises will end up causing the ultimate demise of the entire film industry!