You've talked a lot about how valuable players are in multiplayer games with long term reward systems like loot boxes, unlockables etc. That made me wonder about how hard it might be to make a full next game when so much of that progress will vanish (which I think is one of the reasons TF2 hasn't had a sequel all this time for example). I'd love to hear your thoughts on that
As you said, taking things away from players generates really bad feelings from the most engaged players. Everything that has been released and obtained by players must be supported forever for those players for the remaining lifetime of the game. However, the passage of time is inevitable and the game eventually loses its sustainability over time as player attrition causes engagement to inevitably go down. Even the most entrenched players will continue to age and external life events will occur that pull them from the game - they’ll play other games, they’ll graduate from school, they’ll start careers, they’ll get married, they’ll have kids, and so on and so forth. For many of these players, the amount of money and time spent on a game eventually becomes much less important. When you’ve suddenly become a father and have to take care of the baby, the shiny new raid or game mode often becomes a much lower priority in the grand scheme of things. Even the longest running live service titles like World of Warcraft see significant player attrition over time.
In addition to this, the passage of time causes stress on the technology. Certain assumptions made early in the project (often technical) eventually become untenable for a live service to change or manage, primarily because of how much stuff is built on top of those assumptions. This can be things like how the user database is set up, how the hardware is assumed to work, or how the development tools to create the content were built. Things that worked just fine when there were only a thousand different item IDs in the game to load may no longer work as well when there are a hundred thousand different item IDs in the game. The team working on new content doesn’t have room in the budget or schedule go back to upgrade all of the prior content or technology.
Eventually, the combination of these two major factors - player attrition and outdated technology/design - and their associated ongoing costs dictate that no further development should occur and the game should be quietly allowed to die. However, there are still a lot of fond memories among players who played the game and still a lot of general interest in the IP. This is when we decide to build the sequel for it. We can throw out the old crufty bits and start fresh with modern tech and design paradigms while (hopefully) retaining the concepts and ideas that made the previous game good. A new game will also be able to pull in new players who were interested in the old game but either bounced off due to things like complexity built up over its years as well as old players who lapsed due to some of those aforementioned life changes.
We don’t always get it right for a variety of reasons, but many publishers have been able to establish community migration even with entrenched communities. The annual new sports title rollover, for example, is commonplace. Fighting game franchises like Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Dead or Alive, and Tekken have generally been able to transition their communities to new game iterations. Even some FPS franchises like Call of Duty and Battlefield are (generally) able to make those transitions. Overcoming the bad feelings of abandoning sunk cost is definitely a thing, but there are definitely ways do it properly.
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