THe Arkham example is odd because Microsoft simply doesn't have a history of porting that game. If we want to talk real impact we would talk about COD 4 and 4 2 which got what one re-release? Or Black Ops which to my knowledge has never gotten a re-release. Plus you had 5 Arkham games iirc (not counting Suicide squad) and out of those I remember City being the big one that kept getting the releasesI know exactly how impactful Arkham was i had the stats page up. However people still talk about it and it gets ported often enough.
The only time i hear people talk about Gears is when they talk about popular games. that's its impact it sold a lot. i jumped out of my skin when i saw there were 5 games not 3 like i thought though i would prolly chalk that up to epic being shit rather then anything else.
Popularity is difficult to measure you seem to know this which is why i talked about units sold and mentioned that games like fable which sold less had a larger lasting impact.
I think the only legacy GoW gave us was contributing to the life of the piss filter.
You keep bringing up Fable which seems odd to me as I remember when the first Fable came out it started to dismantle Molyneuxs image. And while people remember the first one fondly it didn't sell systems. And then 2 came out and was ok while the general response to 3 was that it was a huge disappointment. Fable as a series was almost and I mean that "almost" gaslighten into popularity. It did ok but it wasn't.
You can track the rise of the 360 starting with Oblivion and GRAW. Then Gears of War, Vegas and Dead Rising cemented that. The train kept rolling with Asscreed, Mass Effect, Halo 3 and COD4. The problem is that Vegas, GRAW and Gears are dudebro games which the press and Microsoft have tried to eliminate ever since the Kinect. All of these games (except AssCreed) are much more important than Fable in this case. People remember Fable because it was more mass market, but at no point was it more successful than any of those other games.
