Industry Monotony Killed The Video Game Star

I saw this thing on twitter about the death of mascots in video games; how we don't see new ones anymore. It got me thinking about the how the industry has sort of moved away from that mentality.

Easily the biggest mascot in video games is Mario. How Nintendo was able to make an overweight Italian plumber the most iconic mascot in the medium is beyond me, but let's move past that. Mascots for companies used to be so much more prominent back in the day. You had: Crash Bandicoot, Pacman, Spyro the Dragon, Master Chief, Jak and Daxter…the list goes on. While some of these are still in the folds today, how is it that all of Nintendo's characters seem to have this sort of "higher status" than any of the other characters?

Pretty sure every one of these characters has been on a Nintendo system

Nintendo milks the ever loving crap out of their franchises, without argue, but other companies beat them like a dead horse. The key difference between these two scenarios is a pretty fine line, but it's still there. Sometimes Nintendo does cross the line *cough*Mario party *cough* but for the most part when they add to a series, they are always trying to put a new spin on things. Of course nothing comes to mind more than Super Mario himself. After Mario 64, they had Sunshine and Galaxy, both very much the same, but entirely different in their own rights.

Now what did Microsoft do with Master Chief? Make the same shooter 4-5 times and beat him to a bloody pulp. Unfortunately people still keep buying and playing all these rehashed games which just exacerbates the entire situation.

Much more common place in the industry now are series and franchises instead of a single mascot. Like I said before, some of the earlier mascots do still exist. For instance, Spyro the Dragon made a huge comeback with the Skylander series, but that was a fresh take, and now they are rehashing it to make as much money as humanly possible until people finally get bored with it. Call of Duty is Activision's franchise, but you can almost consider that their mascot. Instead of sticking themselves to a single character, they are able to expand past that by always bringing in new stories.

The problem is that once an idea works, people abuse it. When you have a franchise, each new installment improves on the old formula a little and they slap a new story on the whole thing and call it different. With a Mascot, each and every story is largely the exact same, so in turn, they look at innovating the gameplay to differentiate it from a previous release.

Maybe I'm way off base here, maybe I'm not. If done well, I can see both approaches working wonderfully. The problem with mascots is they require a well-designed and likable character with a good game to match it, which isn’t very easy to do. The most recent mascot I can think of to come out of the woodwork was Sackboy, and even that was pretty weak as far as mascots go. So what do you think, are mascots dead?