I'm really surprised at how little these people know the industry. Hell, it's not even the video game industry, just business in general. The key to success with a sequel is to capitalize on what worked well beforehand. If you put out something your core audience likes, they'll buy it and others will follow through positive word of mouth. Since all these people like it, many will buy the DLC as well.
If you chase another audience, the core audience will hate the product, actively avoid it, and get others to do so. The audience you're chasing will drop your product and go back to theirs. After all, why buy an immitator when you can have the real deal? Then, DLC sales will be very low and the overall brand is tarnished.
They're thinking only about short term revenue gain. "Get all the sales in the first week. Who cares what our fans think? We're making money. " This ideology is what will kill Halo until somebody comes along and reboots it years down the line. The entire Xbox Brand might be at risk as well because of this.
I've been seeing it since Halo 2 and COD2. Halo 2 was actually the first game to drop the health packs and put regen health in place. COD2 in 2005 adopted the same thing, they dropped health packs and adopted health regen, COD1 fans were pretty enraged about it, but it was just a taste of things to come.
COD2 adopted the minimap radar bleeps, every time you fired your weapon, you showed up on the minimap...stupid.
The huge shift happened with COD4 though. Thing is, if it wasn't for its sales, people wouldn't have even picked up on the perks and killstreaks bs.
Since then it's been nothing but that with every single FPS. ADS belongs in certain games of FPS, I definitely would agree with that, but a game like Halo, or even a game like Counter-strike, and Quake, it doesn't belong.
Publisher executives don't think that way. They look at the sales numbers of games and from there dictate to the design team what the design should be, and that's sad.
The thing that mind fucks me is why a game like Halo honestly thinks it needs to adopt COD gameplay mechanics in order to deem itself successful. Do the executives really think that it can't be successful on its own?
My prediction for the MCC will be that it will sell like hot cakes. Playlist population numbers will dictate which Halo is the true core Halo the fans love to play, and maybe, just maybe, that will open the eyes of the executives in regards to Halo 5 game design.
Or maybe, MCC is the answer to the core Halo player, and for the COD audience, Halo 5 will attract them...and thus MSFT will have ultimate global domination of the shooter genre.
