Rainbow Six Siege director says making a sequel after 9 years would be a mistake: 'I'm not going to name names, but you see games go through sequels and just completely drop the ball'
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.