Of course. Why do you think they basically disbanded the studio? Because sales were good? It doesnt make sense. Clearly they have plans to use studio for bigger cash cow.
Unfortunately for Logic Artists and us - there were strong group of devs that liked the idea to make this MP whatever title.
Are you saying that THQ Nordic disbanded Logic Artists (you were initially talking about THQ being unhappy)? I suppose you meant that LA decided to disband because of poor sales? I would find that hard to believe, they had planned to stop LA and continue exclusively as their spin-off Dynasty Studio before the game was even released. That new company was already funded in 2021. I don't see how it could have been related to the results of their upcoming game.
Even after the release, the future of the series seemed to depend on the results so nothing indicates that it wasn't at least
somewhat profitable. But it's surely not as profitable as other types of games.
Do you have information that shed some light on this? I wish they announced their definitive intention.
Anyway, this has nothing to do with the publishers.
Yeah, its harded to do and harder, but there is one strong counter-argument: Kingdom Come. Clearly there is a lot of ppl who are interested in historical games. I think it was mentioned also in one of my interviews here that there is small "renaissance" of historical games.
Anyway the point is that Expeditions already had some fanbase. So usually you wont throw such IP out of the window - unless you are not happy with sales or you just have bigger cash cow in mind.
I'm afraid I can't conclude anything from that example. Firstly, KCD is an action, 1st-person open-world RPG so it's quite a different genre. And I haven't played it yet, but is history really an important feature in the game? It's been released 4 years ago already, too. Then just by looking here, it's obvious that almost nobody is interested in Expeditions: Rome, while less mature fantasy games like Black Geyser generate a lot more traffic.
There is a fan base for historical RPGs but these games are still pretty rare in comparison. All I can think of as future historical games is 1428: Shadows over Silesia and Pentiment. And the only upcoming AAA games I see is the next Assassin's Creed about ninjas, if we can even call that series historical - it's more a mix of fantasy / sci-fi hosted in a catchy historical theme (and downed in the Ubisoft sauce).
Yeah, I suppose that the hype behind blockchain technology is big enough to lure a lot of developers and publishers, so maybe many people in Logic Artists wanted to change for something more lucrative, but we'll likely never know for sure what motivated that move.