Square Enix Boss: Multiple sequels required to be successful.
Kotaku had translated an interesting interview from Famitsu (Japanese gaming magazine). Square Enix boss, Yosuke Matsuda, talks about his ideas on how to develop a franchise and that one off hits are rare. Here is the interesting part that Kotaku had to share with us.
Source: Kotaku.com
Cultivating a new IP is very important. This is my own personal view, but I believe that it is very difficult to immediately build up a big IP. Looking retrospectively at the gaming industry, many games take off or get their big break at their third title. There are cases where the opposite is true of course (Laugh).
But regardless, you need at least three games before you can tell whether an IP is going to be really successful or not. I call this my “Law of Third Titles (三作目の法則)” (Laugh). That’s why for the first and second games, you experiment to a degree where you can still be flexible, and if the series has grown enough to be able to expect a big hit for the third game, you expand the scale. If the third title is successful then all is well.
Source: Kotaku.com