alt Hacker NewsWorld of Warcraft has been super successful in its space, and yet Blizzard has failed to make an actual sequel.
> Another example would be Stardew Valley, or Undertale, which had a huge female following (and sales to match) but had to come out of the indie scene, because all these super politically progressive AAA gaming companies somehow are worse at making things that appeal to women than either companies that existed before, or random indies coming from outside the professional world.
Boomer shooters also came out of the indie space. Survival craft hits? Generally indies. There's plenty of genres that, for whatever reason, have been largely ignored by the biggies.
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And thanks for that or we'd be inundated with terrible flops ala SimCity disaster of 2013.
Face it, AAA studios just can't do open world and can't do decades-long development cycles, they always immediately lose the plot beneath super-irrelevant graphics, platform deals/restrictions and other crap that's mostly openly detrimental to gameplay and ease of access.
That they insist on treating game development as movie production is my running hypothesis.
Rimworld also has non-inconsiderable female following, but only because it's a) very mod-friendly and b) in continued development for more than 10 years already. Its attention to relationships and interpersonal stuff also helps.
The “sequel” to WoW is already here. Compare modern WoW to the original. It is essentially a sequel, rebooted several times times over.