Milk money for me is just that, deliver to people more of the same. Creativity is what make games get better, but people fall in love for a franchise, and then come the sequels, and the lack of creativity do not stop devs to selling. In some way you are against inovation and you justify it saying that inovation is milking money because it aim to hit more people. I dont think it makes any sense.
(Not that I'm telling that EA is creative and wants to bring inovation to gamers, EA in fact want to bring gamers to the games, as you said.)
Now we're getting real off-topic.
That's true Games need to be creative every now and then but not every time. Creativity comes with it's risks and costs. It's either amazingly good or terribly bad.
Not to mention even if the Games that are innovative are better, the numbers tell different stories.
Ocarina of Time. A game praised for being revolutionary. A game that showed how amazing open world ARPG's can look like in the future sold worse than the 8'th installment in the Mario party franchise.
And if you think about it, I'm comparing a Advanture RPG that has a big hype with a family friendly mini-game collection that has little to no hype at all. (seriously when did the last Mario party came out? no one talks about it)
If we're talking about money milking then Nintendo was doing it way before it was cool and still does nowadays.
Whats the famous saying? Don't fix what's not broken.
But looking at nintendo we have the best example of creative risk.
The idea of the Wii, rejected by sony and Microsoft turned out to be the revolution of gaming and invention of motion control.
Then we have the Wii U. A idea that not even Nintendo knows what to begin with. Selling terribly with poor game library and small 3rd party support.
Sometimes even a uncreative game is more fun than a creative one and this is why we play video games, because it's fun.
I mean look at bravely default. This game might also be called Final Fantasy III-2 yet it's still more enjoyable than everything FFXIII (imo).
