The lesson of Nintendo is yes.

Note that this is different in gaming than film because of technical progression. But also Nintendo are very good at "same charm, familiar characters and plot, different feel".

People will tell you they do not want endless sequels. Sales numbers will mostly disagree with them.

It's like phones with smaller screens: they always sell poorly in comparison when available and then it's all you hear about online when it's not.

The usual tricks of "noise signals how many are really upset in absolute terms, not the relative popularity", "people will still make noise about what they don't like regardless if that's more popular overall", and "people who hate one attribute of the product can often still like it enough to buy overall".

If Microsoft didn't want to use IP of existing studios, they should not have bought those studios. Why buy id if not to get more id?

Disney + Marvel offers a roadmap for extending existing IP. (Keep in mind that the Marvel acquisition was in 2009.)

Obviously people want sequels, that's why hollywood makes so many of them.

Its Microsoft - why not both?

> The thing is, every time you take a swing on one of those big IPs, you take a risk.

I think the entire content production industry, no matter the medium, is aware of the risk/reward of rerunning existing IP vs creating new IP. There's a reason we get retreads of retreads elsewhere, existing IP is lower risk, higher reward, pretty much always.

Halo is a good example - they fumbled with Infinite. It just wasn't very good. Yet the remake of Halo: Combat Evolved is getting a ton of attention from the fanbase and broader gaming community. If the next Halo is good, that fanbase will come back around.

> I think what they want to do is make the next WoW. Low-risk, customer lock-in, people identifying themselves with their consumption of the IP to an almost ludicrous degree. You see that already in some ways with Fallout 76.

This is what they now want from Mojang and Minecraft. Asha even called it out in her letter.

> I think what they want to do is make the next WoW. Low-risk, customer lock-in, people identifying themselves with their consumption of the IP to an almost ludicrous degree.

Sure, who doesn't want that? You don't get there by gutting the veterans who can rapidly iterate and know the technology and gaming landscape well. In my eye these kinds of layoffs are simply their giving up.

Making the next wow is not low risk. Making a largescale, successful MMO is probably the riskiest endeavor in video game development.

That example only says 3% margin is better than 2% margin, not whether the hypothetical process yields better results than a bond paying 4% (or whatever). If the said process takes exactly 1 year to complete, and requires all the inputs to be provided upfront, then its margins can be directly compared to bond yields, but businesses are rarely that simple.