World of Warcraft: Current Year

Wombat

Blackwing Lair Raider
2,806
1,459
The numbers I have seen suggest that barely 20% of players even do Normal raids, with higher difficulties an even smaller percentage, even after 20 years of players self-selecting to play the game via subscriptions. Spending a large percentage of your development time on something the vast majority of players do not engage with is insanity.

As to the 2.0 dilemma, it is the same for all MMOs - if the new product is a significant divergence from the old product, there's no guarantee the existing player base will transfer over, so you risk spending heavily just to lose your existing (paying) customer base. If it is a distinctly different product, launch it as a new IP and try to profit (as a company) from two separate markets, as they did with Overwatch.
 

Grim1

Bronze Baronet of the Realm
5,003
7,041
It really does make you wonder why WoW 2.0 hasn't even had rumors of being made. I guess it's one of those things where why take a chance of stealing from your golden egg and having it fail and blowing it all up.
Didn't want to compete with themselves. And they saw EQ2 make that same mistake.
 
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Cybsled

Naxxramas 1.0 Raider
18,588
15,147
It really does make you wonder why WoW 2.0 hasn't even had rumors of being made. I guess it's one of those things where why take a chance of stealing from your golden egg and having it fail and blowing it all up.

Didn't want to compete with themselves. And they saw EQ2 make that same mistake.

Pretty much. I wouldn't be shocked if the majority of their current playerbase are still people who have played the game for many years. If you release a true sequel, then all those years of investment don't carry over and you'd probably suffer major attrition. Once you lose a player, it typically is very hard to get them back unless you really impress them.