Q: Spintires Franchise split

Spintires and Mudrunner have a turbulent history and while Mudrunner was released as Mudrunner: A Spintires game or Spintires: Mudrunner in some places, Spintires has made it clear with further updates, DLC and a name change to Spintires: The Original Game that it doesn't want to be associated with the "Runner" series. Would it then be reasonable to split Spintires and Mud Runner into separate franchises?

Cheers

How many games are there? If there's just the two as appears in the wiki here, there can't be two franchises. Franchises require at least 2 games. Also, if Mudrunners was ever at any point supposed to be a Spintires game (as evidenced by what you've said by the title(s)), then it still counts, yes.

I've never heard of any of these games but based on what you mentioned and what I see here on the Wiki it looks like there's no need for a split.

@reverendhunt: There are 2 Mudrunner games now, with the sequel having come out earlier this year(should also be noted in the US they are just Mudrunner, the Spintires name is nowhere to be found on the steam page for Mudrunner 1). It's a kind of strange situation, both series are different developers and publishers, the first Mudrunner had one of the original lead devs of Spintires work on it and they licensed out some parts of the game to the Mudrunner devs for the first one. It's kind of like if the lead dev of PUBG left and went to Epic, helped on Fortnite and they ended up naming it Player Unknown's Fortnite. Strange situation.

I think a couple of reasonable analogues are the Operation Flashpoint/ARMA series and Europa Universalis/Svea Rike, where there is one crossover game that is linked to both franchises because it was released under both brands, and the rest of the games stick to their respective franchises. Freespace is a similar case where the first game was released as a part of the Descent series, but the other Descent games and for that matter Freespace 2 do not reference that connection at all.

I don't see any info on the wiki of Spintires being continued as a franchise, like Dead Island 2 post Dying Light, just that the company sells leftover codes of the original game with "The Real..." or something in front of it.

At least according to this, the sequel to MudRunner was straight up going to be called SpinTires: MudRunner 2 until it got changed to SnowRunner: a MudRunner Game (mirroring how MR is called "a SpinTires Game" in some locales). I don't see where that subtitle stuck at all though, and it's just SnowRunner everywhere.

I think if you really want, you could have ___Runner as its own franchise, with MudRunner and SnowRunner in it at this time, but since MudRunner DOES have SpinTires in its title in some places, it should also still be in the SpinTires franchise (otherwise, you wouldn't need a SpinTires franchise, because franchises require at least 2 games).

It's like how the first Wario Land game is called Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 but the rest of the series isn't affiliated with SML, so only the first game exists in the SML franchise but it and all of the rest are in the Wario Land franchise.