Re: New Historical total war era - Total War: Three Kingdoms!
Originally Posted by
zoner16
I doubt this has to do with resources for other products. The 3K new content team is rather small, for a company as large as CA. Moving them around wouldn't do much, and throwing people onto a project at the last minute only causes chaos. If WH3 was in trouble, they would've delayed it since there's not even a concrete launch date yet.
Much more likely is that the cost of developing past this point couldn't be justified. Given the timing, I'm fairly certain the issues mostly stem from Fates Divided not selling very well, though I'm also certain that this has been brewing longer than that. 3K's daily player numbers rest on the top of the rest of the historical games by only a small amount, which means that potential exposure to DLC news isn't that high.
There's also no way they didn't know that this wouldn't go over well. If they're pulling the plug before the northern expansion, it's because the forecast is that the backlash is worth enduring.
Again, 2 years of updates is about the same as what most historical titles get, so I'm even willing to guess that this timeframe was originally planned to be EoL, just not this abruptly.
I doubt they planned the EoL of 3K to be after around 2 years. CA has supported its bigger titles/cashcows for far longer as can be seen with both Rome 2 and Warhammer 2, the latter obviously helped by being the middle installment of a trilogy but if it didn't remain as popular as it is it'd have probably gotten less content (and 3K might have gotten more). Three Kingdoms had everything to be a new cashcow, the period it covers is immensely popular in East Asia and it had the best launch of any TW game. CA just failed to capitalise on it. Some questionable DLC choices and Warhammer 2's continued popularity and thus attention meant its player levels dropped hard and the later DLC failed to kick it back up again. Rather than gamble on the Northern expansion or a potential Korea DLC to bring the player numbers up to more satisfactory levels CA took the financially less risky option. It's a very surprising choice to me though as they were quite clearly trying to catch the Chinese/Asian fans and trying to pull them into the rest of the franchise as well, with all the blogs including a Chinese translation for example, so sinking your Asian flagship isn't exactly beneficial there I would think. And from what I've seen Asian fan backlash can be very harsh.