Zooming out, I don't see the logic behind "we can't have PoE1 alongside PoE2"
If a company has a product that is profitable there is no reason to stop making that product unless it is directly cannibalizing a competing product they offer. Considering how devoted most fans are I can't imagine there'd be a negative impact on hype/supporter packs with even 6 weeks between PoE1/PoE2 launches. On the labor side forget sharing devs between the games. There is an opportunity cost for any senior developer not focusing all their energy on the latest offering.
But you have a fully baked IP sitting on the sidelines earning nothing in supporter packs atm. If you really strip down what a minimum viable product for new leagues could look like there is a TREASURE TROVE of past league assets that could be repurposed into new leagues alongside skill balance tweaks:
- Talisman
- Synthesis
- Metamorph
- Scourge
- Kalandra
- Crucible
- ToTa
- Affliction
Even a skeleton crew of 10 team members (PM, tech lead, buncha mid/junior devs, and a couple testers) could come up with MINIMAL tweaks to past league mechanics to give them a facelift without any major reworks. With a fresh meta to revisit these old systems I think they'd actually be quite fun. If we could mod the game this would already exist with a shoestring budget.
For the sake of argument lets say it'll take the skeleton crew 6 months to produce a new league and do some basic testing. This is truly a worst case scenario since we're talking about reusing old assets here. No new voice acting, item art, animations, game systems, etc. Screw any marketing outside of a reveal livestream. Youtubers/Twitch will literally advertise the league for you with such a strong IP. For a round number let's say each league costs $1M USD in labor + server costs. Are we supposed to believe that 300k players (VERY conservative estimate) coming back to PoE for a new league can't bring in more revenue than $1M? There's probably over 1000 whales who will buy $160+ supporter packs. Another 10000 at least would gladly drop $30 for existing cosmetics knowing it'll keep their favorite game alive. We're already halfway to profit before factoring in the other 289k players...
The only reasons I can think of are:
- GGG straight up does not like the game that PoE1 has become. To them it has gone too far off the rails in terms of power creep, and it strayed so far from their original vision that they'd rather see it put down than continue to give fans more content. This is odd though since PoE2 endgame is every bit as "single skill screen clear" as PoE1
- GGG has such high standards for their league launches that they can't fathom having PoE1 be in maintenance mode even if the vastly decreased dev effort could lead to more profit for them. But that doesn't make sense since Necro Settlers was the most half-assed league reset I can ever remember, so they are willing to do it when necessary
Vert strange times we live it, but I just can't understand the math behind punting such a valuable IP that is still in its prime (concurrent player record with Settlers).