It's no secret that vidya are a big part of this website's content and the meme world at large, but which series have the biggest representation here (likely a fair gauge of their share of the "meme world", if I'm going to keep calling it that)? Like a number of other KYM studies I've done thus far, I took it upon myself to find out. In addition, I took a look at how each franchise's entry count relates to its age and the number of games it has, as well as which companies have the most entries for franchises they own.
Disclaimers and methodology: Entries have been counted up to February 26, 2018. Like all my other entry studies, I only counted confirmed ones and submissions, not deadpooled ones. I didn't have a solid method of choosing franchises, so I counted ones I consider a "big deal" (and discarding ones with less than 5). This very well means I may have left out some big ones (like BEMANI, which I regret not counting since it has quite a few entries), but I'm fairly sure none of them would have made the top 10. For which entries I consider part of a franchise, if it comes from it, or something that's based on it, or is directly related in some way, it counts. These counts are not necessarily representative of which series are the most "memey" or which one's memes are the biggest, just how often they are covered here.
For each franchise, there are 3 counts (descending order): total, combined total, and unique total. The total is how many entries are counted, the unique total is the total minus the number of entries that it shares with another franchise, and the combined total is the average of the 2 (if shared entries were counted as halves).
Ranked list:
(43 franchises, 902 entries; ordered by total, then combined total, ties ordered alphabetically)
Full list of entries.
1. Pokémon (Nintendo)
141 / 138.5 / 136
2. Super Mario (Nintendo)
85 / 83 / 81
3. Team Fortress 2 (Valve)
75 / 74 / 73
4. Sonic the Hedgehog (Sega)
60 / 56 / 52
5. Touhou Project (東方Project) (indie)
41 / 41 / 41
6. Super Smash Brothers (Nintendo)
41 / 32 / 23
7. The Legend of Zelda (Nintendo)
39 / 37.5 / 36
8. Final Fantasy (Kingdom Hearts included) (Square Enix)
27 / 27 / 27
9. Metal Gear (Konami)
25 / 25 / 25
10. World of Warcraft (Blizzard)
24 / 23.5 / 23
11. Call of Duty (Activision)
19 / 19 / 19
12. Minecraft (indie)
19 / 18.5 / 18
13. Overwatch (Blizzard)
18 / 18 / 18
14. Kirby (Nintendo)
17 / 16.5 / 16
14. The Elder Scrolls (Bethesda)
17 / 16.5 / 16
16. Grand Theft Auto (Rockstar)
16 / 16 / 16
16. Starcraft (Blizzard)
16 / 16 / 16
18. League of Legends (Riot)
15 / 15 / 15
19. Undertale (indie)
15 / 14.5 / 14
20. Fallout (Bethesda)
14 / 13.5 / 13
21. Counter-Strike (Valve)
13 / 13 / 13
22. Halo (Microsoft)
12 / 12 / 12
22. RuneScape (Jagex)
12 / 12 / 12
24. Metroid (Nintendo)
12 / 11.5 / 11
25. Doom (Bethesda)
11 / 11 / 11
25. Half-Life (Valve)
11 / 11 / 11
25. Kantai Collection (Kadokawa)
11 / 11 / 11
25. Mass Effect (EA)
11 / 11 / 11
25. Mega Man / Rockman (Capcom)
11 / 11 / 11
30. Portal (Valve)
11 / 10.5 / 10
31. Street Fighter (Capcom)
10 / 10 / 10
32. Donkey Kong (Nintendo)
10 / 8.5 / 7
33. Megami Tensei – Persona (Atlus)
8 / 7.5 / 7
34. Star Fox (Nintendo)
8 / 6.5 / 5
35. Dark Souls (Namco)
7 / 7 / 7
35. Five Nights at Freddy's (indie)
7 / 7 / 7
35. Left 4 Dead (Valve)
7 / 7 / 7
35. Splatoon (Nintendo)
7 / 7 / 7
39. EarthBound / Mother (Nintendo)
7 / 6.5 / 6
40. Animal Crossing (Nintendo)
7 / 6 / 5
41. Cuphead (indie)
5 / 5 / 5
41. Mortal Kombat (Warner Bros.)
5 / 5 / 5
43. Fire Emblem (Nintendo)
5 / 4 / 3
Entries vs. # of games in franchise: R² = 0.3694
Entries vs. # of years since franchise started: R² = 0.0395
Companies by number of entries in owned franchises:
(only top 5 counted, combined totals used)
1. Nintendo: 357.5 (39.63%)
2. Valve: 115.5 (12.80%)
3. Blizzard: 57.5 (6.37%)
4. Sega: 56 (6.21%)
5. Bethesda: 41 (4.55%)
Other: 274.5 (30.43%)
Notes and observations:
1. Pokémon is the top franchise at about 166% of 2nd place's count. This is thanks not only to it having a popular game series, but being a massive brand and cultural phenomenon from around the time the Internet took off to today.
2. Pokémon and Mario are the top 2 franchises here and the 2 best-selling game franchises ever (just in the reverse order).
3. Nintendo and Valve are the top 2 companies. This coincides with Nintendo's historical lead in the console market (having sold the most of any company) and Valve's current dominance of PC gaming with Steam.
4. If I counted indie games as a company, they would have come in 3rd place with 86 entries (9.53%).
5. From combined totals (middle ones), the top 10 franchises have 537.5 entries altogether (59.59%). Of these, Nintendo has 291. With 54.14% in the top 10, Nintendo is more concentrated there than across the data (39.63%).
6. Team Fortress 2 is the biggest "franchise" with only one game and Sega is the biggest company with only one franchise, Sonic the Hedgehog.
7. The correlation between entries and number of games (R-squared: 0.3694) is much stronger than that between entries and years since franchise started (R-squared: 0.0395), though neither are particularly strong. A franchise being old doesn't mean it will have more memes, but if it has more games at any age, it is probably more popular and may therefore be more "memeworthy".
8. The top 4 franchises appear in roughly the same shape relative to each other in both scatterplots.
