Gaming

I would still prefer the extreme outcome over what we have today.

And I think the community will know and happily share which line to take and if you want sell in the franchise, you got to look out that the community is happy with what you create, which includes plot holes / inconsistencies.

The big corporations just want you to believe that franchises dies if other studios can use it, when it only is about earnings the last penny out of a franchise with the least effort possible. They happily save on production cost and invest a lot in lawsuits (or similar) to maintain their monopoly position.

I mean, that kind of stuff already exists today with the current copyright laws. I remember as a kid reading all sorts of X-Men books and wondering why the characters in the cartoon were so different. Did Han shoot first in Star Wars?

I played the Ratchet and Clank (2016) game this year that's like... Kind of a re-make ish of the first game? Except the story is quite a bit different, there's new characters added and some old ones removed. Half the old levels are gone and there's a couple of new ones added. Mechanically it's a completely different game. And yet that's even from the same studio.

conflicting canon

There is no such thing as a "canon", generally speaking. There are several stories in which part of what makes them good is how well they connect with each other, for example, the books by Tolkien or Asimov, but, to cite another example, the viewer of Doctor Who has to turn a blind eye to the immense amount of contradictory events that confront each other over the course of 60 years. Which is not to say that there is no problem in writing something that decharacterizes the character or universe of the story (Doctor Who's Timeless Children, Zack Snyder's Batman, etc.), or that compromises the logic that the author himself chose to follow throughout the story (Star Wars's Sequels), but, objectively speaking, the only problem this produces is poorly written shit, because, realizing that there is no canon, the next person to write something has complete freedom to ignore the past shit.

I think it sucks that the ZA/UM people split up the way they did, but if each of these studios wants to make their own sequel to Disco Elysium, whether it's spiritual or not, I can and will appreciate them individually and with the relationship they want to establish with Disco Elysium, there being no need for them to be coherent with each other.

thats not really what happens tho before disney was the big evil king of intellectual property and they were running around adapting other works their stuff was stand alone despite being based on existing stories or being adaptations of existing stories. When superman became more or less public domain we didnt see this happen despite his popularity people just did their own unique adaptation/retelling of the story rather than a mess of sequels. What i think would actually happen is that people would retell masseeffects story with their own takes on it and make new stories in that universe or with the original characters (tho im sure it would happen idk why they are all so fucking bland).

And even if there were unofficial sequels the original studio can always slap a "from the original creators of" label to theirs so people obsessed with the official telling of fictional stories know what to obsess over.

Endingtron 3000 --> Startingtron 4000.

Like the F.E.A.R. games. There are four sequels but not all are in the same timeline. At least with Drakengard, the sequels in the different timeline have completely different names.

Drag would like this. Drag thinks Mass Effect 2's combat system sucks. They should have kept the RPG mechanics.