Trivia / Resistance

• Acclaimed Flop: Resistance 3 received great reviews and managed to gather a small but noticeable playerbase. Unfortunately, it was released not too long before an extremely crowded holiday season that included the two biggest shooters of the year, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3, not to mention behemoths like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Batman: Arkham City. And that is not even including Sony's biggest title of the year, Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, which was released a mere two months after Resistance 3 and became one of the most acclaimed titles of the already strong 2011. Ultimately, Resistance 3 sold very poorly in comparison to Sony's other AAA games.
• B-Team Sequel: Resistance: Retribution and Resistance: Burning Skies were developed by SIE Bend Studio and Nihilistic Software respectively. In the former's case, Insomniac helped with the game's early design and concept.
• Creator Backlash: Resistance 2 is this to Insomniac Games. While it's the series' highest-scoring title, fans of the first game were less enthusiastic over the sequel, mostly due to Insomniac taking several ideas from the then-popular template introduced by Call of Duty and other titles. According to Insomniac Games CEO Ted Price, the team was well-aware of the more polarized reception among players and regards Resistance 2 with less enthusiasm than their other titles, to the point of making Resistance 3 its predecessor's anti-thesis.
• Dueling Works: With the Gears of War franchise. Both are series of AAA console-exclusive shooters that feature a Crapsack World, with humanity fighting a Hopeless War against an Always Chaotic Evil race of mutated humans. Interestingly, both series saw three major entries on their respective consoles, release in the same years (2006, 2008, 2011). In the following console generation however, the Resistance franchise was brought down by the back-to-back failure of Resistance 3 (which earned a positive reception from critics but saw tepid sales) and Resistance: Burning Skies (which received middling reviews and was seen by fans as a staid rehash), while the Gears franchise continued on in several B-team sequels.
• Franchise Killer: Resistance: Burning Skies turned out to be this. Having been hyped as a showcase of the PlayStation Vita's capabilities, it received a tepid reception upon release as a competent yet boring shooter that didn't bring anything new to the table and was held back by the limitations of the Vita. The franchise has remained silent since then, with the only acknowledgement of its existence from Sony being a shout-out in Astro's Playroom.
• What Could Have Been: A fourth mainline game was pitched by Insomniac but Sony passed it over due to concerns there were too many games with a post-apocalyptic theme in the studio's upcoming lineup.