The big problem is that the fandom isn’t very big. TSW massively underperformed. SWL’s population has never been huge. There have certainly been more people playing in the past, but would a new release schedule create enough impact to be significant? That’s a trickier call.
TSW’s financial model showed that there wasn’t enough of a fan base for individually priced content packs to be worthwhile for Funcom. Increasing the price up to $50 would also potentially drive away potential customers - I love the ip dearly, but I would not even consider buying a single zone for that much. Remembering the backlash about how empty South Africa felt, it’s hard to imagine how much worse that would have been if people had paid that much for it. And if you’re going to create something which feels like it gives good value for the money, that’d be a LOT of development requirements. The quality of the writing and the story has always been one of the strongest aspects of the ip. Unfortunately, it’s also true that it’s content which is devoured very quickly, and has limited impact in terms of replayability.
The potential negative impact of putting a paywall at the end of the game, locking off new content would risk alienating a portion of an already small community. Back in TSW when issue 12 was needed to play MF & MFB, there were plenty of people who were not happy to have new dungeons paywalled. It’s unlikely to help long term retention much.
The concept of new content reinvigorating the game is also questionable. What we often see in other games with regular content releases is that players come back for the new stuff, but then stop logging in once they’ve experienced it. There would need to be big changes to encourage the average population back to the game for long periods, and once again, that’s going to come with a hefty bill in terms of developer time. Even when there was an advertised roadmap for SWL content, it didn’t really have a positive impact. Instead, it was used as a focus for people complaining about the rate of development. It didn’t make people happy and content to stick around, knowing that stuff was in the pipeline, it just ended up with people getting grumpy that the schedule wasn’t being kept to, wasn’t ambitious enough, etc.
The idea that Funcom could attract hundreds of players back to the game sounds great from a player perspective. For Funcom, it’s much less impressive. Looking at Conan Exiles Server Population & Player Count - MMO Populations (mmo-population.com), CExiles has an estimated daily player count of over 122 thousand players. In terms of priorities, that makes an hour of development time spent on CE far more profitable than spending it on SWL.
Funcom is unlikely to easily win back the hearts of many gamers who felt the company let them down with TSW/SWL. They’ve done more than they might have, (I’m still surprised that the TSW servers are still going and haven’t been shut down,) but I doubt many people would be willing to forgive and forget because they released Congo and dungeons that people felt should have been in the game from release.
Honestly, I’d be thrilled if they put in more dev time for SWL. It may happen, I know that when they were working on the rebalance patch, there was plenty that the devs had in mind about what they’d like to do and ideas of what was possible (apparently changing the last fight in Ankh was very much not possible without rebuilding it from the ground up). Funcom does at least have a track record for keeping game servers on (how old is Anarchy now?) rather than just sunsetting games that underperform, but when you’re talking about games with populations in their hundreds vs hundreds of thousands, you can’t expect a commercial company to prioritise the smaller franchise. With Dune on its way, Funcom’s probably hoping that will dwarf CE, which would be great for them. Maybe they’d then have the time to look at the SW ip and do more with it - it took Guild Wars 7 years to get a sequel, maybe SWL 2 will happen in the future /shrug
