I agree, thats another issue with live service. When you support a game forever and add content to it over the years, the sequal needs to be a huge step forward because nobody will jump ship for a slightly better game with 1 / 10th of content.
You could also do the Overwatch thing and shut down the servers of the previous game so people either have to accept the new game or leave. Solves the problem in the eyes of the executives.
One thing I would say justifies a new game is when you want to resolve a problem that’s ingrained in the existing content, making these changes fight with the majority of the game. A new iteration, a clean slate, can help with that a lot.
And it wasn’t the goal to appease the community, but the shareholders.
They wouldn’t understand why a new product isn’t earning like gangbusters when it’s a sequel to a live service game. They only see a flop that “has to leech off” the profits of its predecessors, making it a liability in the eyes of those people. They mostly care about short term profits, not long term strategies.
Didn’t POE2 start out as an expansion and they quickly realized they would be better off architecturally just creating a new game? I’m pretty sure that’s happened a few times over the years.
You gotta elaborate what that ellipsis means. Why would you want a sequel that splits the playerbase? If the game is still fun, and there’s good reasons to come back to it week after week, why are 10 years of updates bad?
I’m looking forward to the 100 operator mark because the dev team has more than proven their capable of making new operators with abilities that interact with the existing core mechanics in exciting, deep ways. I hope they go far beyond 100 as well.
I didn’t mean it in a “This is bad, I think they need a sequel” way. I more meant it in a “This is Ubisoft and committing to 10 years on anything seems impossible” way.
I definitely like the Siege development team, they consistently have pretty solid updates and balancing choices to address issues in the game.
Gotcha gotcha. I think you have a point, but Ubisoft seems interested in letting their dev teams take enough risks to prove whether players enjoy stuff. Case in point: Ubisoft didn’t pay for dedicated servers for For Honor until players proved resiliently interested in the game. Adding dedicated servers later then increased the playerbase. Furthermore, Operation Health with Siege was a period of time when players were deprived of meaningful content additions but players remained through and the game came out better for it. Fair enough to say that neither of these were a 10-year commitment, but Siege has already proven to be a worthy investment for the past 8 years so maybe it could continue to be for the next 12 ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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