Making people buy your second game in similar (or preferably larger) numbers means that you have to significantly improve the experience. Nobody would pay you for playing the same game three times, that should be obvious.
What a great game with good storyt and graphics doesn't sell games ? madden , tony hawks , guitar hero's , call of duty are all the same games each year. Some things get added but yo ucan still do the same with a planned trilogy. After all you learn alot while programing the 2nd and 3rd games should get better graphics due to more textures and models and animations done through the development process
Making the game better can mean several things, like improving on existing things and adding all kinds of new content.
The first part absolutely requires feedback and experience from the first game and thus it means you can only start the second game once the first is released. Look at how Gears of War 2 has significantly improved even the main characters and the engine as well. Would it have been as successful if Epic just re-used the same engine and content?
The second part also means that either you co-finance two art teams of the same caliber or wait until the one team completes the first game. One year is just not enough to fill up a game with new levels, enemies, weapons and stuff.
Goew 2 could have been very sucessfull and could have been released much sooner had they reuced the same textures , models and other features and gamers would have still eaten it up. You wouldn't be making new levels and enemies and what not in just a year. They would be made over the whole development process . There would be no idle time when artists stop creating and move to other projects. Look again at mass effect 2. The normandy , citidal and other places are all there in the game again and most likely bioware had to pay to make them again.
However, gearing up full scale production of a new IP with two entire teams is clinically insane. You risk wasting two times the money if the first game fails.
Let's look at it from another angle. Would Mass Effect 2 be such a critical success if it had the same main elements, but just with a few new planets? Because that's what your approach would get them.
I think my approach would get them alot more. cod4 to cod 6 was 2 years of development. That included multi and single player . With my system part 2 and 3 of a trilogy would be in various states of completion by the time part 1 shipped. So an additional year of development would surely get a second one out and 2 years would get a third one out.
I'd also like to remind you that Lord of the Rings wasn't 3 movies made at the same time at all and your assumptions here aren't exactly right.
Live action photography involved a LOT of reshoots and pick-ups, because Jackson kept rewriting the script based on his experiences and the reception of the movie. Complete sequences like the ents' siege of Isengard were added months before the premiere of the actual movie.
Also, Weta has worked on the movies sequentially - they only started with TTT once FOTR and its Extended Edition were completed. Gollum was completely re-designed ~8 months before the second movie's release. The visual effects suffered a lot because of this, there were huge amounts of rushed shots with bad compositing of blue/greenscreen elements and so on.
And the reason he was allowed to do this was because he made the entire starting investment back with just the first movie. He realized that he could make better sequels with more resources and work than what was originally planned, and ended up changing almost everything. There's a reason no studio has attempted to work the same way - it is very, very inefficient and risky.[/QUOTE]
