Will POE2 be the POE1 killer?

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innervation wrote:

It's going to be, and they're setting it up to be intentionally or not.

1. They are scheduling leagues such that PoE1 league starts 4 weeks before the end of a PoE2 league. If they wanted to give PoE1 a real chance they would go to an offset 12/14 week cycle (52/4 = 13 weeks per league but that doesn't make for clean halfway points plus we know some leagues need wiggle room with their start/end times) with leagues spaced perfectly in the middle.

Here's how that plays out. Despite the massive amount of delusion and tears, pretty much 99.9% of ppl on these forums and on reddit are going to try PoE2 no matter what. It will also draw in a large new audience. 4 weeks before the end of a league is roughly when they start teasing the name of the next league. How many players are keen to start a PoE1 season when the next PoE2 season is right around the corner? I am, because I'm a degenerate monkey, but positioning PoE1 at that calendar mark gives players a built in excuse to skip it. Lower participation leads to metrics that inform the resource allocators decisions.

2. There are actually quite a few upgrades they aren't bringing to PoE1. Despite saying at every turn 'oh yeah were doing our absolute best to bring all the good stuff to PoE1 where possible' - every time they were asked about a specific scenario the answer seemed to change to 'oh well not THAT, we can't put THAT into PoE1'. And I believe them when they say 'no not THAT', which leaves me to postulate that they are overselling it every time they say 'we're porting as much good PoE2 stuff as we can'.

Here's how that plays out. Some of these PoE2 changes are really good. But they aren't coming to PoE1. Players without enough free time to play both titles and are right on the fence of liking both games equally are going to be swayed by whichever game offers less 'artificial' resistance. I believe PoE2 will have the edge there. Once again, lower participation leads to metrics that inform the resource allocators decisions.

3. MTX are another great example. MTX are shared between both games!! How can this be on the scale?? Well, MTX specific to PoE2 things (like a druid shapeshift skin, or MTX for a skill that doesn't get ported to PoE1) will boost the numbers of the MTX being sold and will make the game look like the better, more supportable title for GGG's future resources.

4. Attracting talent is easier when working on modern problems with modern solutions. No young talented <insert profession here> wants to work on old problems via outdated tools. (How they got Alexander Sannikov is beyond me). No programmer wants to go program in COBOL or VFP. No VFX artists want to be chained to working on character models that Mark said at exilecon are 'borderline unusable'.

Even in house they've already had issues like this. Back when their devs worked on 2 leagues at a time, they would get to a roadblock or problem or 'something hard' when working on league A and would just shelve that project and work on the easier/more fun League B. Same will happen if their in house artists have to choose what to work on. Same for programmers, same for everyone. They will work on the modern product more and harder if given the choice because the tools to approach the problem are modern and easier to use (which makes the work more fun because you can be more successful at it).

5. GGG are going to spend spend spend on advertising and paying streamers for PoE2 launch like nothing they have done before. They will not spend nearly as much on the first post-PoE2 PoE1 league.

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Lets say the first league of PoE2 will have 1 million concurrent players. PoE1 will also get a boost in numbers and its first league post PoE2 launch has 500k concurrent (which would still be a 30% increase over the 370k concurrency record Chris mentioned on Exilecon day 1 stream). All the metrics are going to scream out to GGG resources that PoE2 has more players and is driving more revenue and this will create a self-perpetuating cycle where the obvious action to those metrics is to support PoE2 with the bulk of their resources.

Funny thing about that is suppose you reverse those launch numbers - the support will NOT be reciprocal. If PoE2 underwhelms, sunk cost fallacy is going to weigh heavy and they will throw money at PoE2 giving it every chance to be successful.

Only through consistent and sustained players voting with their time by playing PoE1 more over the course of probably 2 years could we ever get to a point of this looking like OSRS vs sequels.