Ive been thinking about this for a long time. After seeing footage of MW3 at E3, my question to gamers is this: Why isnt the Call of Duty franchise not judged as harshly as other games? For example, the engine. What other franchise would be allowed to use the same engine for nearly a decade? Not to mention the amount of money the studio makes could easily be put to use on their games' behave. Lets use Bioshock: infinite for example. You can clearly tell that Ken Levine and his crew are passionate about the product their going to release. The team is smaller and their commercially less succesful yet their game has new mechanics and a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT ENGINE! 
 
What Im trying to say is, this industry is full of talented people making great games (including Infinity Ward) but the companies that are willing to take a risk and do something different gets shut down(Alan Wake for example) while a company that releases rehashes(thats basically what it is) and makes billions. Isnt that alittle backwards?

Some games get away with it, it's as simple as that. Some games generate such hype and hysteria and are so big and important to the industry that they do not get marked down on areas which other games would do. There really does seem to be an hypocrisy of standards when it comes to certain games. Everything from lack of innovation to poor story-telling seems to get overlooked.

I like to call it the Zelda effect. Effectively they could package a pile of shit in a box and call it Zelda and it would still get higher marks than it otherwise would have gotten if wasn't for the Zelda name. 

Marketing, my friend.
 
 
 
Also, your title really isn't fitting

lol

Depends who's judging.  I think COD franchise is judged more harshly by players. Its an industry like every other. To keep afloat and make profit you turn to a "sure thing" over something that may or may not make you the cash. Thousands of Indie movies are scrapped every year while money is thrown to people like Michael Bay to make yet another shitty Transformers movies or to Martin Lawrence to dress up in fat suit for a third, fourth, fifth time. FPS in general are a pretty basic genre and in a genre flooded with mediocrity the COD franchise is one of the better ones. While people get all pissy about a new COD game every year, people dont seem to conplain that there is a new NHL, NFL, Tiger Woods, Fifa whatever every year for years (no even inducing World Cup games, NCAA etc).  COD is the flavour of the week that all the "cool kids" love to hate on for whatever reason. 
Although the industry is to blame for alot, the new age of gamers is to blame for just as much if not more. I read there boards and every day there is someone complaining about something pointlessly. Staying on subject look at the introduction on COD: Elite. As soon as it was announced that there would be an option to pay for upgraded services people here went ape shit. They completely ignored the fact that they were going to be getting a bunch of services they didnt have before for free and went straight to the bitch-fest. They complain that Halo doesnt charge, well yes it does for the Bungie pro service, they complain that EA doesn't charge for BF games well what about the Battlefield Heroes micro transactions?
 It is a shame that there are very talented individuals in the industry that put all their creativity into projects that nothing becomes of but in today's economy its crazy for large companies to take a risk. People seem to be turning on Bethesda for releasing crap but at least they are giving smaller companies a chance to get there IPs out there. A decent  example is "Hunted - The Demons Forge". This game is the first major title for the company and Bethesda and putting out there. The game itself is an OK game but not great, had it been released a couple of years ago it would have been a great game but im sure through budget, time restraint, manpower, technology, what have you it is released a little out of its time and because of that will not be a big earner. Thankfully every so often a little company come out with something that is amazing and I hope they keep coming but with how expensive it is for independent companies to break into the mainstream one their own chances are their only going to get one shot to succeed and if it doesn't go well the larger companies come in and pick their corpses for the tasty bits. Its just life.
Sorry to rabble on.

you know, game dev story was wrong. You can make a thousand sequels and they will sell more and more